Xinyi Zhao’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

The digital revolution has ushered in many societal and economic benefits. Yet access to digital technologies such as mobile phones and internet remains highly unequal, especially by gender in the context of low- and middle-income countries. While national-level estimates are increasingly available for many countries, reliable, quantitative estimates of digital gender inequalities at the subnational level are lacking. These estimates, however, are essential for monitoring gaps within countries and implementing targeted interventions within the global sustainable development goals, which emphasize the need to close inequalities both between and within countries. We develop estimates of internet and mobile adoption by gender and digital gender gaps at the subnational level for 2,158 regions in 118 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), a context where digital penetration is low and national-level gender gaps disfavoring women are large. We construct these estimates by applying machine-learning algorithms to Facebook user counts, geospatial data, development indicators, and population composition data. We calibrate and assess the performance of these algorithms using ground-truth data from subnationally-representative household survey data from 31 LMICs. Our results reveal striking disparities in access to mobile and internet technologies between and within LMICs, with implications for policy formulation and infrastructure investment. These disparities contribute to a global context where women are 21% less likely to use the internet and 17% less likely to own mobile phones than men, corresponding to over 385 million more men than women owning a mobile phone and over 360 million more men than women using the internet.

Although considerable progress toward gender equality in science has been made in recent decades, female researchers continue to face significant barriers in the academic labor market. International mobility has been increasingly recognized as a strategy for scientists to expand their professional networks, and that could help narrow the gender gap in academic careers. Using bibliometric data on over 33 million Scopus publications, we provide a global and dynamic view of gendered patterns of transnational scholarly mobility, as measured by volume, distance, diversity, and distribution, from 1998 to 2017. We find that, while female researchers continued to be underrepresented among internationally mobile researchers and migrate over shorter distances, this gender gap was narrowing at a faster rate than the gender gap in the population of general active researchers. Globally, the origin and destination countries of both female and male mobile researchers became increasingly diversified, which suggests that scholarly migration has become less skewed and more globalized. However, the range of origin and destination countries continued to be narrower for women than for men. While the United States remained the leading academic destination worldwide, the shares of both female and male scholarly inflows to that country declined from around 25% to 20% over the study period, partially due to the growing relevance of China. This study offers a cross-national measurement of gender inequality in global scholarly migration that is essential for promoting gender-equitable science policies and for monitoring the impact of such interventions.

Digital and computational demography explores demography in relation to the digital revolution – the rapid technological improvements in digitized information storage, computational power and the spread of the internet and mobile technologies since the turn of the new millennium. We cover three ways in which the digital revolution touches upon demography. First, we discuss how digital technologies, through their impacts on daily lives and in shifting how individuals access information, communicate and access services, have implications for demographic outcomes linked to health and mortality, fertility and family, and migration. Second, we discuss how the digital revolution has created a wide range of new data sources such as digital trace and geospatial data that can be repurposed for demographic research, and enabled respondent recruitment across the world via the internet and social media. Third, we discuss how improvements in computational power have facilitated the use of computational methods such as microsimulation and agent-based modelling as well as machine learning techniques for demographic applications. We conclude by discussing future opportunities and challenges for digital demography.

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996–2020. We construct the partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of this group: the returnees. Our analyses shed light on the career stages and gender disparities between researchers who remain in Germany, those who emigrate, and those who eventually return. We find that the return migration streams are even more gender imbalanced, which points to the need for additional efforts to encourage female researchers to come back to Germany. We document a slightly declining trend in return migration among more recent cohorts of researchers who left Germany, which, for most disciplines, was associated with a decrease in the German collaborative ties of these researchers. Moreover, we find that the gender disparities for the most gender imbalanced disciplines are unlikely to be mitigated by return migration given the gender compositions of the cohorts of researchers who have left Germany and of those who have returned. This analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the development of science policy.

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996-2020. We construct the partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of this group: the returnees. Our analyses shed light on the career stages and gender disparities between researchers who remain in Germany, those who emigrate, and those who eventually return. We find that the return migration streams are even more gender imbalanced, which points to the need for additional efforts to encourage female researchers to come back to Germany. We document a slightly declining trend in return migration among more recent cohorts of researchers who left Germany, which, for most disciplines, was associated with a decrease in the German collaborative ties of these researchers. Moreover, we find that the gender disparities for the most gender imbalanced disciplines are unlikely to be mitigated by return migration given the gender compositions of the cohorts of researchers who have left Germany and of those who have returned. This analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the development of science policy.

Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Using an exhaustive set of over eight million Scopus publications, we analyze the trends in international migration to and from Germany among published researchers over the past 24 years. We assess changes in institutional affiliations for over one million researchers who have published with a German affiliation address at some point during the 1996-2020 period. We show that while Germany has been highly integrated into the global movement of researchers, with particularly strong ties to the US, the UK, and Switzerland, the country has been sending more published researchers abroad than it has attracted. While the balance has been largely negative over time, analyses disaggregated by gender, citation performance, and field of research show that compositional differences in migrant flows may help to alleviate persistent gender inequalities in selected fields.

Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Using an exhaustive set of over eight million Scopus publications, we analyze the trends in international migration to and from Germany among published researchers over the past 24 years. We assess changes in institutional affiliations for over one million researchers who have published with a German affiliation address at some point during the 1996-2020 period. We show that while Germany has been highly integrated into the global movement of researchers, with particularly strong ties to the US, the UK, and Switzerland, the country has been sending more published researchers abroad than it has attracted. While the balance has been largely negative over time, analyses disaggregated by gender, citation performance, and field of research show that compositional differences in migrant flows may help to alleviate persistent gender inequalities in selected fields.