IDRC: Latin American Open Data for gender equality policies focusing on leadership in STEM

This project aims to contribute to the generation and use of open data comparable between countries in order to evaluate policies and interventions to reduce the gender gap in STEM, promote public discussion aimed at increasing the number of women leaders in universities, industries, and public institutions, and encourage the development of open data-based web and mobile applications to increase awareness of the importance of women in STEM.
The specific objective for the first year (2022), to which all the items stipulated here refer (activities, costs and indicators), is to map the factors, actors and policies that influence the professional development of women in STEM, collect data related and analyze this data.

This initiative, partially funded by the International Development Research Center - IDRC, will begin with 3 countries involved in this consortium and others that collaborate. The members of the consortium are the Federal University of Mato Grosso (Brazil, leading institution), University of Lima (Peru), Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (Brazil), Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil), Universidade Federal Santa Catarina (Brazil), University Mayor of San Andrés (Bolivia), Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo (Bolivia).
Considering that part of the problem of gender gaps in STEM in Latin America is related to the lack of recent and reliable data, this project aims to contribute to the generation of comparable data between countries to evaluate policies and interventions to reduce the gender gap. gender in STEM, especially increasing the number of women leaders in universities, industries, and public institutions. We plan to map the factors that influence the professional development of women in STEM, as well as document and analyze successful and less successful initiatives and learn from them.
To model these factors and initiatives in an open data infrastructure, we will apply a Semantic Web infrastructure (https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/). These standards allow linked data to create data stores on the Web, develop vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. The Semantic Web Infrastructure creates a technology stack to support open data infrastructures through ontologies that can be used in vertical applications, for example in education, government, and industry, to improve collaboration, research and development. It would also be possible to work with inference rules and knowledge graphs with the information available in the data infrastructure. These tools could allow better formulation of policies and interventions. The proposed open data infrastructure would become a platform to discuss, in an integrated way, how we can reduce the STEM gender gap in Latin America. Therefore, it is possible to generate comparable data to inform and generate policy recommendations for public and private institutions. All of that will be available on a platform in 3 languages.
In addition, a collateral objective is to strengthen collaboration with these South American universities interested in the subject, to learn from each other and establish long-term collaboration. Universities from other countries in the region and abroad are expected to be included in the future, to systematically collect more and better data on the subject.

A lack of recent and reliable data is partly to blame for gender gaps in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in Latin America. This project aims to contribute to the generation of cross-country comparable data to assess policies and interventions to reduce the gender gap in STEM, especially by increasing the number of female leaders in universities, industries, and public institutions.
The project team will map the factors that influence the career development of women in STEM, document and analyze successful and less successful initiatives, and identify lessons learned. An open-data infrastructure will be used to map the information and build a platform for improved collaboration between those in education, government, and industry seeking to reduce the STEM gender gap in Latin America. The platform initially will be available in three languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and English), starting with the three countries participating in the consortium – Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru – with a view to future expansion to other countries in the region and elsewhere.
This project is part of a cohort of seven projects that were selected following IDRC’s call for proposals to the Gender in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Research Initiative. The aim of the cohort is to increase the contribution of science to gender equality. It seeks to advance women’s leadership and participation in STEM, and to increase gender analysis in STEM research.