Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Jacqueline Lane, Harvard Business School "Rewiring the Gender Distribution of Technical Jobs"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Jacqueline Ng Lane - Postdoctoral Fellow, Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH), Harvard Business School
Title:
Rewiring the Gender Distribution of Technical Jobs: Online Training Programs and (In)equality
Abstract:
Emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing the nature of work, leading to a technical skills gap between what mid-career professionals do and what they need to be effective in their jobs. Online programs in technical fields provide one promising avenue for addressing the growing skills gap. Yet given historical processes of gender inequality in the workplace, particularly in technical fields, one important question to ask is to what extent do online technical training programs equally attract men and women to apply. We investigate this question using proprietary data on the multi-staged decision processes made by 180,186 prospects on whether to apply to an executive-level online technical training program in business analytics, augmented with communications data on the count and length of interactions between each prospect and admissions counselor pair. We find that female prospects self-steer away from applying while admissions counselors screen-out female prospects by preferentially allocating resources to male prospects. Counter to theories of homophily, which suggests that individuals prefer to associate with similar others, we find that gender congruity between female prospect-counselor pairs reduces the likelihood that females advance through the admissions process. Examining contextual features, we find that more gender-balanced workgroups and prior experience with female prospects may attenuate gender differences in application outcomes.
Speaker Bio:
Jackie Ng Lane is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Business School and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH). Her research focuses on organizations, and lies at the intersection of knowledge production, social networks, diversity and careers. She uses quantitative methods, complemented with qualitative insights, and natural field experiments to examine (1) how informal knowledge sharing affects the knowledge production process, (2) the implications of social networks on performance and career outcomes, and (3) the extent that access to managerial skills training in technical fields promotes workforce diversity.
Jackie has a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University. Before graduate school, she worked in sales and trading, equity research, and in retail services and operations.
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)