Assistive technology is often employed to enhance individuals' ability to access or benefit from a program, service, activity, or facility, aiming to foster the inclusion of people with disabilities. The advancement of digital technologies has made assistive devices smarter; however, not all innovations effectively address the real challenges faced by disability communities. It is widely acknowledged that collaboration and open innovation among diverse organizations can promote the emergence of new ideas, leveraging the strengths of different stakeholders while balancing their varying expectations. Since patents serve as an important indicator of innovation, this study focuses on analyzing the patent collaboration network to identify the collaborative relationships among organizations. By examining the evolution of assistive technology patents in China over a period of 30 years, we trace how the development of assistive technology for disability has historically been driven by diverse actors - beginning with individuals, then manufacturers, and more recently medical and technological sectors. We further explore the roles and interactions of key contributors, highlighting how universities have consistently acted as crucial connectors, bridging corporate and governmental efforts with the disability rights movement. Finally, we examine the technologies deployed within these collaborations, assess the role of artificial intelligence, and discuss how such cross-sectoral partnerships influence the inclusive innovation.

Little is known about technological trends and value changes related to disabled people in China. This is despite the implementation of laws towards disability inclusion. To fill the research gap, this study analyzes patents targeted at the blind, lodged within the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database from 1999 to 2023. It examines the changes in technology patents, and its relationship to the development of disability inclusion and policy making in China.

Understanding different gender roles forms part of the efforts to reduce gender inequality. This paper analyses COVID-19 family clusters outside Hubei Province in mainland China during the 2020 outbreak, revealing significant differences in spreading patterns across gender and family roles. Results show that men are more likely to be the imported cases of a family cluster, and women are more likely to be infected within the family. This finding provides new supportive evidence of the 'men as breadwinner and women as homemaker' (MBWH) gender roles in China. Further analyses reveal that the MBWH pattern is stronger in eastern than in western China, stronger for younger than for elder people. This paper offers not only valuable references for formulating gender-differentiated epidemic prevention policies but also an exemplification for studying group differences in similar scenarios.

Contact patterns play a key role in the spread of respiratory infectious diseases in human populations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the regular contact patterns of the population have been disrupted due to social distancing both imposed by the authorities and individual choices. Many studies have focused on age-mixing patterns before the COVID-19 pandemic, but they provide very little information about the mixing patterns in the COVID-19 era. In this study, we aim at quantifying human heterogeneous mixing patterns immediately after lockdowns implemented to contain COVID-19 spread in China were lifted. We also provide an illustrative example of how the collected mixing patterns can be used in a simulation study of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

To estimate the basic reproduction number of the Wuhan novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

The gender gap in labor market is an important issue in gender inequality. It will also enlarge gender differences in other fields. Among them, motherhood penalty refers to the negative impacts of the birth event on women career development, which could explain a considerable part of the gender gap within labor market. Although extensive studies have been accomplished, a comprehensive landscape of this domain has not yet been built. In this survey, the related progresses, including the quantification and comparison of motherhood penalty in different times and regions are presented and the main factors affecting the strength of motherhood penalty from the individual, family and political perspectives are discussed, where the emphasis is put on Chinese situations. Concentrating on the contradiction between labor and labor, this survey summarizes the known explanations into three different yet related theories: family restriction theory, human capital theory and employer discrimination theory. From the supply and demand sides of the labor market, we suggest two ways, namely empowering women and creating opportunities, to help women balance their family and working duties. Lastly, we propose political recommendations and outline a number of open issues for future researches.

We found that 61.9% of frontier multimodal AI models have employed paired alternative text (alt-text) - text aligned with multimedia content for web accessibility - for training purposes. This finding stems from the curation and comparison of the "Notable AI Models" dataset by EpochAI (1) with detailed training dataset information primarily sourced from Papers with Code (2). Alt-text and broader accessibility motivations have additionally facilitated the development of numerous AI datasets and papers. Recognizing the evident yet often overlooked connection between accessibility and AI, we further examine the strengths and limitations of our findings, provide a conceptual interpretation of this connection, and, more fundamentally, explore how, at this critical juncture of global deliberation, debate, and enforcement of AI regulations, our findings and conceptualization might lead to a novel accessibility-focused paradigm for AI governance.

Equal pay is an essential component of gender equality, one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Using resume data of over ten million Chinese online job seekers in 2015, we study the current gender pay gap in China. The results show that on average women only earned 71.57% of what men earned in China. The gender pay gap exists across all age groups and educational levels. Contrary to the commonly held view that developments in education, economy, and a more open culture would reduce the gender pay gap, the fusion analysis of resume data and socio-economic data presents that they have not helped reach the gender pay equality in China. China seems to be stuck in a place where traditional methods cannot make further progress. Our analysis further shows that 81.47% of the variance in the gender pay gap can be potentially attributed to discrimination. In particular, compared with the unmarried, both the gender pay gap itself and proportion potentially attributed to discrimination of the married are larger, indicating that married women suffer greater inequality and more discrimination than unmarried ones. Taken together, we suggest that more research attention should be paid to the effect of discrimination in understanding gender pay gap based on the family constraint theory. We also suggest the Chinese government to increase investment in family-supportive policies and grants in addition to female education.

Women are set back in the labor market after becoming mother. Intuitively, childcare services are able to promote women employment as they may reconciliate the motherhood penalty. However, most known studies concentrated on the effects of childcare services on fertility rate, instead of quantitative analyses about the effects on women employment. Using worldwide panel data and Chinese data at province level, this paper unfolds the quantitative relationship between childcare services and women employment, that is, the attendance rate of childcare services is positively correlated with the relative employment rate of women to men. Further analysis suggests that such a positive impact may largely resulted from breaking the vulnerable employment dilemma.