News

On March 12, 2021 the School of Asian Studies of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs, HSE University, held the conference ‘Women in The East: History, Society, Science’ for the first time.

Every year, HSE University carries out dozens of studies on women’s lifestyles, behaviours, and changes in family, social, and economic status in Russia. IQ.HSE editors have selected the most essential trends revealed by these studies about Russian women today.

Alcohol use is decreasing in Russia, alongside a gradual decline in alcohol-related mortality and crime. However, according to the WHO, Russia is still among the top twenty countries in the world with the highest per capita alcohol consumption.

Tweets about Russia by Donald Trump during his presidency caused short but noticeable depreciations of the rouble. Meanwhile, the introduction of new sanctions, upon which the president did not comment, had no such effect. This was the finding of a group of researchers, which included Elena Fedorova, Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences of HSE University. The group published their findings in in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

The pandemic has increased opportunities to reduce harm resulting from drug use. Against the backdrop of quarantine measures in Russia, an increase in the active development of work through online platforms with people who use drugs has begun. The available results have already demonstrated their effectiveness.

HSE University held a round table devoted to science  documentaries. The participants discussed possible approaches to securing support for movie production and distribution, choosing topics of interest, and encouraging cinemas to show films about science.

An international team of scholars studied how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Europeans’ stress levels and their trust in their national governments and the healthcare systems. They found that respondents were most stressed by the state of the national economy, and only after that, by the risk of catching COVID-19 and possibly being hospitalized. In Western Europe, people trust their governments more than in other EU countries. The results of the study were published in Royal Society Open Science.

On March 18, HSE University will host the international Neurotechnology & Freedom Conference, which will be held online. In an exchange with HSE News Service, Vasily Klucharev, director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and tenured professor at HSE University, discussed what views on the compatibility of these two concepts exist in modern science and art.

Modern neuro-imaging techniques allow a more accurate answer to the question of which media content has a high chance of becoming popular and which does not. It also helps to identify brain areas responsible for different emotional reactions to narratives and establish the role of biases in processing the information. A group of scientists from HSE University and Aalto University published a review of recent scientific work in this area in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

On average, women in Russia earn 30-35% less than men. According to this indicator, Russia is ahead of many developed countries. The difference in earnings is primarily associated with the uneven distribution of men and women in different industries and professions, but economists cannot explain a significant portion of the discrepancy. Aleksey Oshchepkov, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at HSE University, came to these conclusions after analyzing research materials and survey data. The results are published in a chapter of the volume, Gendering Post-Soviet Space, recently published by Springer.