Formal Institutions and Women’s Electoral Representation in Four European Countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands

This research attempted to produce evidence that formal institutions, such as electoral and internal party quotas, can advance women’s active roles in the public sphere using the cases of four European countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The quantitative dataset was provided by the University of Chicago and the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research based on a two-year study (2008-2010) of political parties. Belgium engages in constitutionally mandated electoral quotas. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, on the other hand, have internal party quotas, which are voluntarily adopted by political parties. In analyzing each country’s chi-square and Pearson’s r correlation, Belgium, having electoral quota, is the only country that was analyzed for electoral quotas. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands’ internal voluntary party quotas were correlated with women’s descriptive representations. Using chi-square analysis, this study showed that the presence of electoral quotas is correlated with an increase in the percentage of women in decision-making bodies as well as with an increase in the percentage of women in decision-making bodies. Likewise, using correlational analysis, a higher number of political parties employing internal party voluntary quotas is correlated with an increase in the percentage of women occupying seats in parliament as well as an increase in the percentage of women nominees in electoral lists of political parties. In conclusion, gender quotas, such as electoral quotas or internal party quotas, are an effective policy tool for greater women’s representation in political bodies. Political parties and governments should opt to have gender quotas, whether electoral or internal party quotas, to address the underrepresentation of women in parliament, decision-making bodies, and policy-formulation

Women\u27s Electoral Participation in Muslim Majority and Non-Mulsim Majority Countries

This paper aims to look and discuss the association of Islam and women’s electoral participation in Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority countries. The dataset that was used for the analysis, entitled “Party Variation in religiosity and women’s leadership: A Cross National Perspective, 2008-2010”, was taken from the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research, University of Michigan who approved the use of their dataset. The unit of analysis targeted 329 political party lists in 26 countries. Women’s political participation was operationalized as electoral quota for women, internal party quota, percent share of women in decision-making bodies, interaction of percent female leadership with female membership, and percentage of female nominees. Test statistics, such as t-test, Pearson’s r, chi-square, and correlation were applied in analyzing the data in order to come up with empirical relationships. The results show that there is an association between Islam and women’s political participation, as well as difference in women’s electoral participation between Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority countries. However, the coefficient of determination was small which suggests that there are other factors that explain women’s electoral participation in these countries. Also, this paper illustrates two opposing views regarding secularist feminism and Islamic feminism

The Electoral Quota—A Form of Gender Quota to Increase Women’s Participation in Parliament: A Quantitative Study from a Survey in the Middle East

Objective: This research focuses on the impact of political parties and electoral quotas on women’s political participation within the context of Islam. Methods: This study utilizes quantitative methods in analyzing women in eight Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East. The statistical dataset was culled from Kaasem’s work entitled Party Variation in Religiosity and Women\u27s Leadership: A Cross-National Perspective, 2008-2010, published by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research of the University of Michigan. The statistical analysis and modeling focused on selected Middle East countries, namely: Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Turkey, Israel, and Kuwait. The sample consisted of 126 observations at the political party level Results: Gender is construed as a classification of being a woman or a man not merely by biological identification but one that is embedded within culture, and structures of power in families, communities, and states, which have gender in itself, as an organizing principle. Woman’s question (dispute of women) is identified as a complex personal and social problem, and therefore cannot be rejected as a valid search for gender sameness or equality. Based on the quantitative analysis of the dataset of the survey conducted among selected Middle East countries, electoral quotas and seats occupied in previous parliaments affect women’s nominations in current parliaments. Conclusion: The research shows that electoral quota for women has proven to increase female participation in parliaments

Assessing the Association Between the Night Shift Schedule and Mental Health Symptoms among Filipino Women Factory Workers: A Cross-Sectional Study

Within the fields of mental and occupational health, the “night shift” is one of the major concerns the work-time schedule. The association between working at night and the occurrence of mental health symptoms among women workers has been a subject of considerable debate. This study explores the association between working at night and mental health symptoms, and the mediating factors to this association. This study examined a database of 500 factory workers, about 90% of whom were women who had originally been pat of a study of hazard exposures and the occupational health of workers in export processing zones in the Philippines. The database included variables relating to work schedule such as the night shift, overtime, and extended work, as well as mental and psychological health indices collected through a survey questionnaire. Descriptive statistics developed, and the crude associations between shift schedule and probable confounders with the frequency of occurrence of mental health symptoms were studied using a chi-square test of association. The confounding effect of each probable confounding variable including age, sex, educational attainment, tenure and workload towards the main association (the night shift and mental health hazard) was analyzed by obtaining the Mantel-Haenszel odds ratios of the association, controlling for the particular confounder. A multiple logistic regression was used to analyze the overall association of interest, simultaneously controlling for all confounders. The crude odds ratio for the association between shift schedule and frequency of occurrence of mental health symptoms is 2.13 (0.77-5.81). This means that without adjusting for confounders, those who work night shifts are 2.13 times more likely to have a frequent occurrence of mental health symptoms as compared to those who work in the daytime hours. Specifically, among women, those who work at night are 2.97 times more likely to have frequent occurrences of mental health symptoms compared to those who work in the day. Controlling for age, sex, educational attainment, tenure, workload, and exposure to occupational hazards, those who work at night are 2.13 (0.79-5.71) times more likely to have frequent episodes of mental health symptoms compared to those who work in the morning. Those who are frequently exposed to occupational hazards are 5.78 (1.17-28.71) times more likely to have frequent mental health symptoms as compared to those who are not. The evidence for this association is strong. The study has shown that among Filipino women factory workers, nightshift work is associated with mental health symptoms. There is a need to address the problems encountered by night shifters, especially the mediating exposure to occupational hazards. There may be conditions at work that predispose women workers to more hazards during night shifts compared to day shifts. Mental health among night shifters should be addressed as a concern in occupational health

Senior Recital: Sophia Brattoli, Trombone; Lu Witzig, Piano; October 28, 2023

Kemp Recital HallOctober 28, 2023Saturday Evening6:00 p.m

Sophomore Recital: Sophia Brattoli, Trombone; Lu Witzig, Piano; April 10, 2022

Kemp Recital Hall April 10, 2022 Sunday Afternoon 4:30p

Generative Modeling for Tabular Data via Penalized Optimal Transport Network

The task of precisely learning the probability distribution of rows within tabular data and producing authentic synthetic samples is both crucial and non-trivial. Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) marks a notable improvement in generative modeling, addressing the challenges faced by its predecessor, generative adversarial network. However, due to the mixed data types and multimodalities prevalent in tabular data, the delicate equilibrium between the generator and discriminator, as well as the inherent instability of Wasserstein distance in high dimensions, WGAN often fails to produce high-fidelity samples. To this end, we propose POTNet (Penalized Optimal Transport Network), a generative deep neural network based on a novel, robust, and interpretable marginally-penalized Wasserstein (MPW) loss. POTNet can effectively model tabular data containing both categorical and continuous features. Moreover, it offers the flexibility to condition on a subset of features. We provide theoretical justifications for the motivation behind the MPW loss. We also empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on four different benchmarks across a variety of real-world and simulated datasets. Our proposed model achieves orders of magnitude speedup during the sampling stage compared to state-of-the-art generative models for tabular data, thereby enabling efficient large-scale synthetic data generation.Comment: 37 pages, 23 figure

Junior Recital: Sophia Brattoli, Trombone; Brett Harris, Trombone; Lu Witzig, Piano; April 7, 2023

Kemp Recital HallApril 7, 2023Friday Evening6:00 p.m

Large-scale event extraction from literature with multi-level gene normalization

Text mining for the life sciences aims to aid database curation, knowledge summarization and information retrieval through the automated processing of biomedical texts. To provide comprehensive coverage and enable full integration with existing biomolecular database records, it is crucial that text mining tools scale up to millions of articles and that their analyses can be unambiguously linked to information recorded in resources such as UniProt, KEGG, BioGRID and NCBI databases. In this study, we investigate how fully automated text mining of complex biomolecular events can be augmented with a normalization strategy that identifies biological concepts in text, mapping them to identifiers at varying levels of granularity, ranging from canonicalized symbols to unique gene and proteins and broad gene families. To this end, we have combined two state-of-the-art text mining components, previously evaluated on two community-wide challenges, and have extended and improved upon these methods by exploiting their complementary nature. Using these systems, we perform normalization and event extraction to create a large-scale resource that is publicly available, unique in semantic scope, and covers all 21.9 million PubMed abstracts and 460 thousand PubMed Central open access full-text articles. This dataset contains 40 million biomolecular events involving 76 million gene/protein mentions, linked to 122 thousand distinct genes from 5032 species across the full taxonomic tree. Detailed evaluations and analyses reveal promising results for application of this data in database and pathway curation efforts. The main software components used in this study are released under an open-source license. Further, the resulting dataset is freely accessible through a novel API, providing programmatic and customized access (http://www.evexdb.org/api/v001/). Finally, to allow for large-scale bioinformatic analyses, the entire resource is available for bulk download from http://evexdb.org/download/, under the Creative Commons -Attribution - Share Alike (CC BY-SA) license