NSF Award Enables Fox’ Innovative Project on Transmission of Knowledge about Women in Science and Engineering

Mary Frank Fox, ADVANCE professor, School of Public Policy, has been
awarded a two-year $300,000 grant by the National Science Foundation as
Principal Investigator for the study of “The Transmission Zone between
the Producers and Consumers of Knowledge about Women in Science and
Engineering.”

Fox and her collaborator, Gerhard Sonnert (Harvard University), were
motivated to undertake this project because a deep gap continues to
divide the research producers and the broader consumers of knowledge
about women in science and engineering—with some consumers (including
working scientists) experiencing frustration about not being able to get
pertinent knowledge in a form that works for them. Although a wealth of
data and knowledge about women in science and engineering exists, this
knowledge often fails to reach intended consumers: working scientists,
students, administrators, and all those interested in understanding and
enhancing the participation and performance of women in science and
engineering.

Fox’s project is a strategic study that investigates the key
dimensions of the problem of this “transmission zone” and identifies
blockages and inefficiencies in the current system of transmission of
knowledge, with broader implications for promising initiatives and
models of such transmission.

Using multiple methods—bibliometric means, individual interviews, and
organizational analyses—the project is innovative, even unique. It
takes knowledge about women in science and engineering as a focal case,
and recognizes and addresses the transfer of knowledge from producers to
consumers as “non-automatic,” and more problematic, than previously
assumed in prevailing research about the diffusion of knowledge.

Fox says “this project takes a leap from research and theory on
diffusion of knowledge that has preceded it. It goes beyond the passive
broadcast model of knowledge, and aims to identify and understand active
and effective agents of knowledge transmission in the nationally and
internationally critical area of women in science and engineering. The
project intends to map the various channels of diffusion, identifying
ways in which effective diffusion of knowledge about women in science
and engineering can overcome costs of cognitive load, effort, and time
among potential consumers. In reality, the broadcast model of
publication may suffice for scientists when working within their own
research subareas, but ‘knowledge transfer’ does not operate in this way
when the targeted audience goes well beyond non-specialists who,
nonetheless, have a crucial need to know.”