January 19, 2024 | News | Awards

Two Awards for Xinyi Zhao

Xinyi Zhao won two awards in December: the Jan M. Hoem Paper Award and the Best Poster Award at the fifth IMPRS-PHDS Annual Academy.

Xinyi Zhao won the Best Paper Award. © MPIDR/Wilhelm

Xinyi Zhao is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and a member of the Laboratory Migration and Mobility. She received the Jan M. Hoem Paper Award for her paper "A gender perspective on the global migration of scholars". In this paper, Xinyi and her colleagues examined the gender-specific patterns of transnational academic mobility. In their study, Xinyi and her colleagues provide a cross-national measure of gender inequalities in the global migration of scholars, which is essential for promoting gender-equitable science policies and monitoring the impact of such policies. The results of the study show that female researchers are still underrepresented among internationally mobile scientists. It is true that the countries of origin and destination of both female and male mobile researchers worldwide have become more diverse. This could mean that the migration of researchers has become less skewed and more global. However, the study also shows that the diversity of countries of origin and destination is still lower for female researchers than for male researchers, and female researchers migrate shorter distances.

The Jan M. Hoem Paper Award was presented in early December at the Annual Academy, which is part of the IMPRS-PHDS doctoral program. This is the fourth year that the prize has been awarded. It was created to recognize young scientists at MPIDR for a paper that exemplifies quality, innovation, originality, and scientific achievement, as exemplified by the work of Jan M. Hoem.

Xinyi Zhao with the Best Poster Award. © MPIDR/Wilhelm

In addition to the Best Paper Award, Xinyi Zhao received the Best Poster Award at the IMPRS-PHDS Annual Academy for her poster on "Gender Differences in the Conflict between the Beginning of an Academic Career and Parenthood".

Xinyi Zhao received her Master's degree in China (Nanjing University) with a major in Geographic Information Systems. The topic of her master's thesis was "Spatio-temporal dynamics analysis of interprovincial migration system in China". Xinyi Zhao is currently doing research on "Gender Inequality in Research: Opportunities or Challenges in the Age of Globalization and Digitalization?

Original Publication

Xinyi Zhao, Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Ridhi Kashyap and Emilio Zagheni: A gender perspective on the global migration of scientists. PNAS (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2214664120