Science

The Leaking Pipeline of Women’s Academic Careers

Female academics are a minority, compared to male academics. This overrepresentation of men is even stronger in higher ranking positions. The Leaky Pipeline hypothesis explains this discrepancy by focusing on the strongly selective nature of an academic career.

Do children keep their mother from working? Winning the ‘Best Poster Award’

I presented a poster presentation called “Do children keep their mother from working?” at a Ph.D. conference at the Institute for Innovation and Governance Studies, University of Twente. I won the ‘Best Poster Award”! The jury was pleased with a …

Presentation: Explaining Polarization

Today, I am attending the ‘Day of Sociology’ conference at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. I look forward to all the presentations, together covering the broad field of Sociology in Flanders and the Netherlands. Also, I will present a …

Sex discrimination in graduate admissions? A real-life aggregation paradox

A 1975 study on graduate admissions at Berkeley found that male applicants had a substantially higher likelihood of being admitted, compared to women. However, upon closer examination the presence of aggregation paradoxes do not legitimize the conclusion that women were …

The Human Fertility Database

Data comparability is a valuable thing, and achieving high levels of compatibility is exactly the goal of the Human Fertility Database. From the website: The main goal of the Human Fertility Database (HFD) is to provide access to detailed high-quality …

Simpson’s Paradoxical Card Trick

Imagine this card trick. A statistician divides a regular deck of cards into two sets: one of 20 and one of 32 cards. Next, he urges two groups of students to investigate the cards, and hands out one set of …

WorldBank on iPhone: Great initiative, but not quite there …

Last Tuesday, I wrote about the Open Data initiative of the World Bank, and mentioned the iPhone App that provides access to a great amount data. Isn’t it lovely to be able to access information on a large number of …

World Bank Open Data Initiative

Following upon my declaration of the Decade of Data, I think it is very impressive that the World Bank decided to share its data. As part of their ‘open data initiative’, data from their large number of databases is made …

Attending QMSS2: Analysing the lifecourse

I am very proud to have been accepted for participating in the Summer School on Analysing the life course. This summer school is part of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences 2 (QMSS2) program, funded by the European Science …

Have a great Decade of Data!

Now that I am trying to get to a regular blogging schedule, I realized that I have not wished my readers a happy new year. Although I am traditionally late with these kind of things, I suppose now is too …

Curving Normality

Curving Normality is an academic website and blog maintained by Rense Nieuwenhuis.

Rense is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institue for Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS) of the University of Twente.

His work is forthcoming in the Journal of Marriage and Family and the European Sociological Review.

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Recent Activities

Conference: Day of Sociology