Women's invisible work in disaster contexts: gender norms in speech on women's work after a forest fire in Sweden

The aim of this study is to investigate what women do in disaster situations and how both men and women perceive and discuss the work of women. These patterns were evidenced in the stories that were told following the largest forest fire in the modern history of Sweden in July 2014. The study is based on 31 retrospective interviews with volunteers involved in combating the forest fire and concentrates on stories about the supportive work of women during this disaster. The results indicate that women were praised when they followed traditional norms but were denigrated when they performed what were viewed as male-coded tasks. The stories reveal norms concerning what a woman is and is not by focusing on women's age and clothing and by directly and indirectly questioning their abilities and authority. The norms are also rendered visible by the positive attention that women receive while describing doing what is expected of them.     

Reliability of a Questionnaire and an Ergonomic Checklist for Assessing Working Conditions and Health at Call Centres

Background. The purpose was to study the test-retest reliability and internal consistency of questions in aquestionnaire concerning working conditions and health and the inter-rater reliability of observations andmeasurements according to an ergonomic checklist. Method. Fifty-seven operators participated in a retestquestionnaire and 58 operators participated in an inter-observer test. Results. The questions had fair to good or higher reliability in 142 of the total of 312. Twenty-seven of the total of 44 variables in the ergonomicchecklist were classified as having fair to good or higher reliability. Conclusions. About half of the questionshad fair to good or higher reliability and can be recommended for further analyses. The majority of variablesin the ergonomic checklist were classified as having fair to good or higher reliability. Low reliability does notnecessarily indicate that the reliability of the test, per se, is low but may signify that the conditions measuredvary over time or that the answers are aggregated in one part of the scale.     

Growth of non-English-language literature on biodiversity conservation

English is widely recognized as the language of science, and English-language publications (ELPs) are rapidly increasing. It is often assumed that the number of non-ELPs is decreasing. This assumption contributes to the underuse of non-ELPs in conservation science, practice, and policy, especially at the international level. However, the number of conservation articles published in different languages is poorly documented. Using local and international search systems, we searched for scientific articles on biodiversity conservation published from 1980 to 2018 in English and 15 non-English languages. We compared the growth rate in publications across languages. In 12 of the 15 non-English languages, published conservation articles significantly increased every year over the past 39 years, at a rate similar to English-language articles. The other three languages showed contrasting results, depending on the search system. Since the 1990s, conservation science articles in most languages increased exponentially. The variation in the number of non-English-language articles identified among the search systems differed markedly (e.g., for simplified Chinese, 11,148 articles returned with local search system and 803 with Scopus). Google Scholar and local literature search systems returned the most articles for 11 and 4 non-English languages, respectively. However, the proportion of peer-reviewed conservation articles published in non-English languages was highest in Scopus, followed by Web of Science and local search systems, and lowest in Google Scholar. About 20% of the sampled non-English-language articles provided no title or abstract in English; thus, in theory, they were undiscoverable with English keywords. Possible reasons for this include language barriers and the need to disseminate research in countries where English is not widely spoken. Given the known biases in statistical methods and study characteristics between English- and non-English-language studies, non-English-language articles will continue to play an important role in improving the understanding of biodiversity and its conservation.