Category Archives: Gender Equality

Our thoughts and feelings about gender equality, and what we are doing to combat all types of gender inequality, towards people of all genders.

Careers, Gender Equality

‘Northern Lights’: Developing a new Aurora alumni network

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Jane Richards kicking off the meeting about the new network

This month, we brought together women from across the University who have attended the Aurora programme, a leadership programme to help address the issue of women being less represented in senior roles. There are more than 40 Aurora alumni at Newcastle University, with over half of those coming from our Faculty. Here, Jane Richards, our Deputy Director of Faculty Operations, tells us more about what she got out of Aurora, and why she is taking the lead in setting up a new group at the university for participants and alumni from the programme.

I attended the programme when it was still at the pilot stage in 2013/14. I was asked to participate by our Registrar to help test the water, along with an academic colleague. I presume that I was chosen because I had been identified as having leadership potential, and so was both flattered and enthusiastic about participating.

That pilot year was an interesting one. A particular highlight of the programme was the ‘Learning Set’, which involved a group of us meeting to help each other approach particular problems we had back at work. I was struck by how similar our issues were, in that regardless of our background, discipline or planned career path, we all felt hampered by our environment in achieving what we wanted. And we didn’t all want to be Professors, PVCs or Registrars. Some of us wanted to be the best we could be in a small pond, and it was important to recognise that that’s alright too. Good leaders are essential at all levels in the University.

I remember my action from the Learning Set was to knock on doors and ask for a pay rise… I won’t tell you the result! But my colleagues pointed out that my male colleagues wouldn’t think twice about doing it. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”, my Learning Set asked me, and it has been my mantra ever since.

I was inspired to get this group together for a number of reasons:

  • To give something back to the University for investing in me
  • To identify a powerful voice for women in leadership at the University
  • To create a community of alumni and potential entrants to Aurora (some of us are from the same Schools and didn’t even know each other, even when we’d been in same Aurora cohort!)
  • To support other women into leadership
  • To celebrate the impact of the Aurora programme

I have been thinking about organising the group for a long time, as I have been a role model and mentor for a few years without sharing my experience with other role models and mentors. We can learn from each other and make a difference if we pool our knowledge: we can be better at what we do.

Our first meeting set the principles and purpose of the group, and I was encouraged that I had done the right thing by getting this group together. As I suffer like many others with “imposter syndrome”, I had worried that others would not share my vision. We all recognised the need to support each other and new participants and applicants. We all also wanted to be part of the community.

We have decided to meet more regularly, to welcome new participants, to encourage alumni to become mentors, to look for funding for our events, to be ambassadors for women into leadership and to make the selection process for applicants more transparent. The University has invested time and money into our development and we feel strongly that re can provide returns on that investment.

Wish us luck!

Careers, Gender Equality

Juggling

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Juggling

This week someone told our team about the Facebook group Women in Academia Support Network (#WiASN), and we have found it so enlightening! It’s a group that does what it says on the tag: A network run by women for women where staff in academia can share their thoughts/worries/problems/news and rants to get feedback and support from their peers. And what’s interesting (And in some ways oddly reassuring) is that seniority doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to shared problems. Women at many different levels of their career are all voicing similar issues, meaning that everyone can learn from each other. Now there’s a novel idea!

A snapshot of some of the recurring posts shows that one of the main worries facing women is how to juggle their work commitments with home life. The concerns differ: Am I a bad mother for going back to work so soon? Is it socially acceptable to keep my maiden name for my publication record? Am I a bad academic for wanting to spend time with my child? How can I manage the emotional stress of trying to find a home-work balance? But they all highlight the difficulty of being an ‘Academic mum’.

Another theme seems to be early career researchers (ECRs) trying to establish their own sense of self in their careers, with ‘imposter syndrome’ being a common phrase. One very clear issue for many ECRs seems to be the weight of guilt of holding a prestigious grant or fellowship and constantly feeling that they’re unable to ‘live up to’ the kudos. This is something that we’re very aware of in the faculty at Newcastle, and are hoping to hold workshops to help support ECRs with issues such as these.

Finally, one of the striking threads of conversation comes from the “Should I jump ship and leave academia?” question. The pros of flexible working and clear career pathways are argued against bigger salaries and leaving work firmly in the office drawer. There is a sense of guilt over ‘betraying’ supervisors or ‘wasting’ PhDs offset against accolades of achievement in getting a ‘dream job’ or finally being able to actually apply knowledge into the ‘real world’. It’s a pertinent question that not many ECRs dare ask: Is the grass greener outside of academia? Or does it, at the very least, have a chance to grow better?

If you’re a woman in academia, the group is definitely worth a look…

 

Gender Equality

Discoveries

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We are thrilled to be working with The Discovery Museum over autumn, helping them to assess the impact and effectiveness of their Play & Invent programme in changing gender attitudes. The museum are doing some fantastic work with young children to encourage and nurture more open-minded views about gender-neutral career roles and role models. We will be working with the team to consider how the activities are benefiting children and their families, and where they can be built on to be even more successful.We will also be collaborating with the museum on a series of ‘women in science’ events, where some of our excellent female scientists and researchers will be presenting their work, inspiring the future scientists of tomorrow!

Watch this space for more info on specific events and to see the results of the impact assessment…

Gender Equality, LGBT+

Boys in dresses?

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Last week John Lewis became the first UK retailer to abandon gender categories on their own-brand children’s clothing. Their head of children’s wear explained the decision, stating ““We do not want to reinforce gender stereotypes…and instead want to provide greater choice and variety to our customers.” Hoorah to that!

A quick Google search for ‘boys dresses’ to find a suitable picture for this post resulted only in what you see above. Something out of Tudor times. Or from another continent. John Lewis are the first UK clothing chain to acknowledge that perhaps the enforced labelling of what a boy or girl ‘should’ wear is similarly archaic and culturally constrained. Rather than re-designing their clothing range, they have simply ditched the labels and abandoned the separate sections characteristic of most clothes stores.

But is this ‘political correctness’ gone mad? One MP has criticised the decision saying “Boys and girls labels and signs are informative. I think removing them could be very confusing for the consumer… I cannot see many customers buying a dress for their six-year-old boy.” He is, perhaps, missing the point. Which is exactly that we need to move away from this mentality that a certain type of clothing is meant for one sex or the other.

We should also give parents some credit. Moving the pasta next to the jam in a supermarket doesn’t send your average adult into turmoil because they wouldn’t expect those two things to be together. They might need to ask the first time. But then they’ll get it. Perhaps no boy really wants to wear a skirt. But is that because none of the other boys are doing it yet? Or because mum or dad walks straight past the ‘girls’ section in the store? Maybe little girls do want to wear pink flowery dresses, and that’s fine.They’re still on the shelves. It’s just now, they will be on the shelf next to the purple dinosaur top or the pink star shorts. And parents won’t be dictated to as to which child they’re designed for.

 

Gender Equality

Pink spacesuits?

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Astronauts

Can women be astronauts? This seems to have been a theme on the BBC over the last couple of weeks, with two different TV programmes addressing issues of career gender roles and stereotypes. The first, ‘No more boys and girls’, documented the work of Dr Abdelmoneim and his experiment to examine whether making small interventions to the classroom environment could change the strict gender-typed views of 7 year olds. The premise was a good one: To challenge traditional stereotypes about what boys and girls can do by pointing out equalities rather than differences. The execution? A developmental psychologist might be left saying ‘Hmmm’. No verbal matching. No matched control group. Massive long tasks for busy parents to complete. Sweeping conclusions based on a handful of children in a community school on the Isle of Wight. It actually downplayed the fantastic work that many schools across the UK are already doing to promote gender neutrality in schools. There are girls’ football teams. Children may well have seen a male ballet dancer. And most 7 year olds probably know that a woman can go into space too. Great that it made parents stop to think about the influence they were having. And great that some of the girls came away with higher self-esteem whilst some of the boys found a new love of sewing. But ground-breaking or revolutionary, it was not.

Perhaps more encouraging was Sunday night’s documentary about 12 astronaut applicants. Where men and women from all sorts of backgrounds (From surgeon to mountaineer to PhD student-come-ballet dancer) were filmed going through the rigour of the astronaut selection process. No fuss was made about the gender, age or background of each person. It was simply about how difficult a profession it is and how much each individual had achieved to get so far. Showing how everyone overcomes their own barriers and that gender or race have nothing to do with ambition. So perhaps this is the way to teach children about gender equality. Instead of priming them with tasks that are all about gender expectations, actually just let them see, without the labels or rules, what any individual is capable of.

What do you think works best to teach our next generation that the presence of a Y chromosome (or not) doesn’t matter? How can we encourage true gender equality in our youth…?