This post was contributed by members of the Transforming Institutions by Gendering contents and Gaining Equality in Research (TRIGGER) team – a research project in Birkbeck’s Department of Management – following a workshop which they led at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Ireland on Thursday, May 21
The Birkbeck team brought TRIGGER to the Dundalk Institute of Technology (DKIT) to discuss the persistence of gender inequality in career opportunities and in women’s expectations of their future careers. How institutional specific environments as well as general patterns of discrimination influence career paths formed the context to the discussions.
Professor Colette Henry, a member of the TRIGGER team and Head of Department of Business Studies at DKIT as Chair, asked the panellists to reflect on their own experiences. The panel unusually combined perspectives from high-level diplomacy with those of academia – Birkbeck, DKIT and Queen’s University Belfast.
The panellists were:
- Ambassador Rasa Adomaitiene, Ambassador of the Republic of Lithuania to Ireland.
- Professor Nola Hewitt-Dundas, Queen’s University, Belfast, Management School
- Viviana Meschitti, TRIGGER Project, Birkbeck, London
- Ms Amanda Kirk, Careers Office, Dundalk Institute of Technology
- Ms Shirley McCay, UK Trade & Investment, British Embassy
Three main issues stood out:
1) Should women have a plan for their career at the outset in order to succeed?
However, this is not straightforward. It was repeatedly said by the audience of academic and professional staff inside and outside DKIT that women very often lack the confidence to put themselves forward.
Junior staff are sometimes satisfied to get to middle levels of management, rather than aim for the top. They often do not apply for posts if they do not fulfil all the criteria, whereas the pattern is that men tend not to be so inhibited. Moreover, at DKIT, mature women students often do not have the same confidence in their abilities compared with those who have recently left school.
However, Nola Hewitt-Dundas suggested that a career is only one aspect of life. It describes who we are not what we are. Women role models have a powerful influence on women’s perceptions of what is possible. As Viviana Meschitti advised the women in the audience, be a mentor and be a role model. Women should be encouraged to take a challenge – be brave!
2) The uniqueness of the challenges to women in returning after maternity leave.
The diplomatic service like academia requires staff to travel but for much longer periods of time. An academic career is an international career – how do women balance a family with travelling even for short periods of time?
Balancing home and career is challenging. But a male voice in the audience suggested that women have more of a choice than men, who do not get the same opportunities for paternity leave, even under the new EU equalities legislation on parental leave.
3) The effectiveness of intervention.
Professor Nola Hewitt-Dundas demonstrated that of the 100 academic women who had been mentored since 2000, half of them had been promoted. This radically improved the gender balance at senior positions in Queen’s University – and overcoming some of the problems with the gendering of careers.
Dundalk has no formal mentoring system. A lesson from the previous workshop in March at Birkbeck was that there should be systematic attempts to identify why people have not been promoted. As a senior woman executive at Cisco on the lack of women in senior posts, was quoted in the Evening Standard in April this year, ‘Find the women’. International Women’s Day is a great way to promote women.
In addition – what this workshop did throw up was that there are some policies and actions in DKIT on gender equality but that there was a lack of general awareness of them. Indeed the institute was described as being ‘child hostile’. An outcome of the workshop may be that it will seed grassroots initiatives for gender equality, which the Institute will find hard to ignore.
The challenge for Birkbeck is to make sure both that there is better awareness of the range of actions designed to support diversity to ensure that more women take part. Moves to institutionalise gender and diversity issues into college-wide decision making processes are steps in the right direction.
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