Lórien MacEnulty

Project at the MaCI

Despite half a century of equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, the rate at which women and other gender minorities (GMs) participate in the computational and physical sciences (CPS)— in direct contrast to other sciences like biology—remains tenaciously low at all critical intervals of research and development economy-wide. Probabilistic Amalgamation and Reformulation of Androcentric Deterrents to Inclusion of Gender Minorities in scientific disciplines—or PARADIGM—offers a unique approach to understanding both the practical and epistemic makeup of scientific masculinities in CPS through development, rigorous testing, and exploitation of a mean-field probabilistic model for the theoretical prediction of female-to-male ratios across STEM disciplines. PARADIGM synthesizes interdisciplinary knowledge on gender dynamics with applied mathematics methodologies, reframing the environmental factors influencing gender diversity within a numerical scaffolding assembled from well-attested techniques in probability and mean-field theories. PARADIGM tenders an ambitious schedule of research diffusion, including publications, conference symposia or workshops (one of which will be hosted locally for UGA stakeholders), and a GUI web application: an open-source calculator, designed by UX and UDI accessibility principles to allow users to tinker numerically and visually with the model using their own numbers.

Across their 10+ years of often interdisciplinary research, Dr. MacEnulty has been exposed to a multitude of intersecting environments, a cumulative experience that equipped them with nuanced intuition into how scientific cultures influence gender dynamics and vice versa. Energetic and meticulous, dedicated to justice, diversity, and the scientific method, Dr. MacEnulty aims to strategically improve the hospitability of the computational and physical sciences to minorities through applied mathematics, data feminism, graphic design, and software development.

PARADIGM is to be conducted by Dr. Lórien MacEnulty, a computational physics and feminist researcher, and co-supervised by Dr. Clémence Clos an economist at PACTE whose research focuses on labour economics and feminist economics, and Dr. Roberta Poloni of SIMaP at Grenoble INP.

Dr. MacEnulty is immensely grateful for the GATES Fellowship at MaCI. They would also like to acknowledge the following academics for their crucial support and encouragement as well as their conceptual impact on PARADIGM: 

• Dr. Elena Schaa, National Hellenic Research Foundation (Greece)
• Prof. Annalisa Casini, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)
• Prof. Adrienne Traxler, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)