Research in academia is a wonderful intellectual pursuit, but are the fruits of that pursuit equally available to all? What if you are a woman? Do you have the same opportunities and outcomes as your other colleagues? In this episode, we talk to Mohammad Hosseini and Shiva Sharifzad, authors of Gender disparity in publication records: a qualitative study of women researchers in computing and engineering (linked below), a highly illuminating paper interested in the answers to these questions. This research was carried out at Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland and found that, during a 5 year window, "women researchers had fewer publications, received fewer citations per person, and participated less often in international collaborations". Their paper offers a fascinating insight into some of the underlying challenges that contributed to this - and contains more than a few surprises. If you care about understanding and redressing the challenges that women in research face, which has implications for society more broadly, then listen in on this important conversation.

Note: This episode supports a "Chapters" feature, which is available in the web player and many podcast apps.

About Mohammad Hosseini (Full Bio)
Born in Tehran (Iran), Mohammad acquired a B.A. in Business Management and an M.A. in Applied Ethics in the Netherlands (2009-2016). Fascinated by the ethics of scholarly authorship and publication issues, he completed a PhD in Research Ethics and Integrity in Ireland (2017-2021). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago. Mohammad's professional goal is to cultivate fair and inclusive working cultures and improve the ethics and integrity of research.

About Shiva Sharifzad (@Shiva_Sharifz)
Shiva Sharifzad is a Gender and Gender-Based Violence Analyst. She has a Bachelor in Law and an LLM in Human Rights Law from Iran, and an MAS in Transitional Justice, Human Rights and the Rule of Law from Geneva.  Originally from Tehran (Iran), now she is based in Geneva (Switzerland) working with the UN, and other International Organizations.

Main Talking Points

• The barriers women face when publishing
• Citation quality and its importance
• The fight for the authorship byline
• The Women in Leadership plan at DCU
• The burden that gender balance policies can impose
• Initiatives to help those taking and returning from maternity leave
• The need for more men to be involved in gender-related research
• The vast majority of our discussion is on the research itself, though we do relate some of the work in the paper to the ideas of Simone De Beauvoir

Links To The Paper and Related Work

• Gender disparity in publication records: a qualitative study of women researchers in computing and engineering - The paper by Mohammad Hosseini and Shiva Sharifzad discussed in this episode
• The Senior Academic Leadership Initiative (SALI) - A separate article by by Mohammad and Shiva on SALI itself

Other Links

• Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex  - We mention De Beauvoir's work describing woman as an "other" in relation to man. The opening paragraph of this article by Nasrullah Mambrol provides an excellent overview of this topic

Show Info, Contact Details & Credits
See here. 

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

In this one famous line from Star Trek, the ever-logical Spock seemingly nailed his flag to the mast of Utilitarianism. But what if Kant had been a member of the team aboard the USS Enterprise? He may have thrown a glass of cold water over Spock and exclaimed, "You're wrong! The needs of the few may triumph!" So, who should we side with here? What do we do when different philosophical systems disagree and guide us towards conflicting solutions? In this episode, Declan and Simon introduce a new ethical system they've been cooking up. Can we balance the needs of the many with the needs of the few? Let's see what Nested Utilitension can do!

Note: This episode supports a "Chapters" feature, which is available in the web player and many podcast apps.

Main Talking Points

• What are the problems with some of the existing ethical theories?
• Rebooting the classic ticking time bomb thought experiment
• Nested Utilitension
• The Utility Plunge
• The significance of nesting groups inside larger groups and expanding outwards when making ethical comparisons
• Ethical circuit breakers
• Does who you are change how you decide what's right?

Other Links

• The Philosophists - Episode 2 covered Utilitarianism and Deontonology (including some Kantian ethics) and may be worth a listen first. The show notes are also worth a look
• The Philosophists - Episode 4 covered the Trolley Problem and some more Utilitarian/Kantian discussion
• The Repugnant Conclusion
  • Derek Parfit’s famous paradoxical conclusion that, for any world with all very happy individuals, there can exist a better world (in terms of the Utilitarian maths) with a much larger population of whose lives are barely worth living.
  • Good explainer video by Julia Galef but you'll still need your thinking hat on!
• The Veil of Ignorance
  • John Rawls theory on how to design a fairer society
  • An illustrated overview narrated by Stephen Fry

Show Info, Contact Details & Credits
See here. 

Wisdom... an old and dusty concept that has fallen down the pecking order in today's world. As a result, it's no surprise that many feel our civilisation is slipping ever deeper into an idiocracy. Well, this episode aims to single-handedly arrest that slide... and bring wisdom back into fashion! To this end, we have enlisted the talents of Jason Merchey, who literally wrote the book on wisdom. In fact, he's written four, including his latest work - Wisdom: A Very Valuable Virtue That Cannot Be Bought.  Given his lifelong study of this subject, Jason helps us tackle wisdom from many angles. He uses a supporting cast of wise quotations from down through the ages to prevent us losing sight of what wisdom really means - and why it is indeed a most valuable virtue.

More About Jason
In addition to being a philosophical thinker and author, Jason is a master’s level psychologist, proponent of the research ideal, social critic, author / essayist / blogger, and a student of the tradition of arts and letters. You can buy Jason's latest book on Amazon (or enter our competition - see below!) or follow his work via his website.

Note: This episode supports a "Chapters" feature, which is available in the web player and many podcast apps.

Main Talking Points

• What is wisdom?
• Capitalism, Sisyphus and higher values
• The usefulness of philosophy
• The power of quotations
• Effective truth-seeking
• The wisdom and anti-wisdom of intuition
• Is America wise or unwise?
• Wisdom vs common sense
• Changing opinions, changing climate
• The knowing nod of older Ireland (and why some things may be best left unsaid)
• Respecting elders but perhaps not their ideas
• Conflating status with wisdom
• Real wisdom, real estate, and investing
• What can Foucault, Trump and Mussolini teach us about Irish house prices?
• Staying sane in an insane world

Other Links

• The Road Less Traveled  by Scott Peck (1978) A very influential book on psychology that Jason cites
• Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience by Stephen S Hall (2010) A book on wisdom with a big impact on Jason's philosophical thinking
• The myth of Sisyphus by Alex Gendler (TED Ed) Wonderfully illustrated video of this mythic tale
• Jason's Wisdom Search Engine - a quote database that around 36,000 quotes for you to explore
• Stanford Prison Experiment -  a highly unethical study to analyse behavioural effects in a two-week simulation of a prison environment (wikipedia)
• The Stanley Milgram Experiment: How Far Will You Go to Obey an Order
• Citizens United Supreme Court Decision (wikipedia)

Competition
Send us in your favourite quotation - and why it is - to be in the running to win one of the 3 copies of Jason's book that he is kindly giving away to listeners! Enter using our contact details below.

Show Info, Contact Details & Credits
See  here.