Tag Archives: gender

Adapting to changing career priorities

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This post was contributed by Birkbeck student, Emma Curry, who recently attended a networking event hosted by the Transforming Institutions by Gendering contents and Gaining Equality in Research (TRIGGER) team – a research project in Birkbeck’s Department of Management

CareerOn 10 July, the TRIGGER team was delighted to welcome Dr Carol Small (a former senior lecturer at Birkbeck who has worked in a variety of industries) to discuss her experiences of working within computing, and to share some advice on how to adapt to roles within different kinds of organisations. The event also sought to provide a networking opportunity for Birkbeck staff, students and alumni, many of whom were interested in pursuing a career in IT.

In search of career ‘flow’

Dr Small opened proceedings by asking the audience: what are the constituents of a good career? Rather than money, power, or academic prestige, Dr Small suggested one goal that might be worth striving for is that which psychologists define as ‘flow’. A position of ‘flow’ in your career is one in which a high level of skill meets a high level of challenge, meaning that you are constantly excited by your work and do not notice the time passing.

Dr Small then took us through the various roles she had worked in over the course of her career, and the challenges and opportunities that each role afforded. Her career began as a commodity broker (a job in which she was the computer) before moving on to becoming a programmer in the civil service. She then moved into academia, completing an MSc and PhD at Birkbeck and taking on a lecturing role.

Career steps: Academic and banking

In an academic job the role is split into three components: teaching, research, and administration, which, as Small highlighted, can be challenging if your interest lies in only one of these aspects. A lengthy academic career can also be a problem for moving back into industry, unless you have a specialism that is particularly sought after. However, as Small emphasised, such a move is possible, provided you plan ahead, and move in incremental steps, perhaps by moving into an interim role in order to gain some experience.

Following a move away from academia, Dr Small worked on encryption for a small software company before moving on to become a freelance programmer at Deutsche Bank.

Dr Small emphasised that the banking industry has incredibly high IT demands, so this can be an excellent route in to industry, but she warned that it is important to tailor your CV to the company you’re applying for, by making sure you ‘tick the boxes’ in terms of programming languages etc.

Often large companies are looking for a background of jobs in industry, so it is important to emphasise where your strengths lie if you have had a more varied career path. A freelancing role can be incredibly rewarding, as it forces you to do your best work for your customer, but it can also be stressful in terms of job security.

Career progression

ComputingDr Small also suggested that networking was a very important skill to develop in building your career. She advised that it is very important to overcome shyness and make as many connections as you can across the course of your career, as often companies will invite candidates they are already aware of to apply for roles. Being vocal was also an important way of rising within the ranks once you have entered a company: as Small suggested, being active and asking about promotional opportunities was a very valuable way of receiving feedback on your work.

Dr Small also emphasised the difficulties of remaining a computer programmer throughout your life: in such an incredibly fast-moving industry, it can be difficult to keep up to date with constantly-changing programming languages, and she suggested that it is often necessary to plan a move from a technical role to a managerial one relatively quickly. Managerial roles can be tricky, as they involve delegating and being less involved in the ‘nuts and bolts’ work, but also incredibly rewarding in terms of influence and variety.

Gender

The discussion then turned to issues of gender. Dr Small emphasised that often large companies such as Deutsche Bank have specific policies related to discriminatory issues, and are very interested in hiring and promoting people in protected groups. However, often these policies are not always enacted.

Small suggested remaining observant and proactive, and thinking about how you can effect change within an organisation. She also emphasised the importance of having the right sort of mentoring, from people who know the organisation well and can provide you with a checklist of ways to progress, and of finding someone equally ambitious that you can team up with.

During the Q&A portion of the event, there was also some discussion about the relationship between family and career, especially for women. In such a fast-moving industry it can be very easy during times of leave to fall behind with the latest developments. However, the importance of finding a way of keeping in touch with your organisation was stressed, even by working just a few hours a week.

In response to the final question of the event, of how you achieve ‘flow’ in a managerial role, Dr Small suggested that one of the most rewarding elements was having the power to make a difference within an organisation. With gender issues becoming ever more part of the conversation in both industry and academia, this power to bring about institutional change will be a very valuable one in the future.

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Career paths, gender and early stage careers: Learning from others and maximising potential

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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

Trigger-blogThe 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:

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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Academia’s gender inequality problem

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This post was contributed by Professor Helen Lawton-Smith of Birkbeck’s Department of Management. Professor Lawton-Smith is organising Improving gender equality in work – what can we learn from London’s business and policy organisations? on Wednesday 18 March, 2pm-5pm.

laboratoryWomen are under-represented in senior positions in science, engineering, maths and medicine disciplines at UK universities. Initiatives including Athena SWAN and the Aurora Women’s leadership programme have been set up to address this problem, yet such initiatives by themselves are not enough to tackle the problem of the current gender bias. What is needed is institutional embedding, so that gender and other diversity issues are integrated into an equality framework of decision-making processes and structures within organisations, which cannot be side-stepped by those in positions of power.

The four-year Transforming Institutions by Gendering contents and Gaining Equality in Research (TRIGGER) project at Birkbeck is championing the role of female academics in scientific subjects as part of a five-country European project. This initiative is testing a blueprint designed to raise the status of women in scientific and technological organisations such as universities. The nine action areas are designed to identify barriers to equality in the workplace, including the impact of research. The project builds on Birkbeck’s existing commitment to promoting female academics. Results and reactions have been very interesting.

Equality issues have been tackled in a variety of ways by companies and by policy making bodies such as local authorities and government agencies. According to the New York Times in October 2014, Silicon Valley also has a diversity problem – one which is being tackled head on by companies such as Google and Facebook.

Academia has a lot to learn from how other kinds of large organisation have identified the nature and causes of gender inequality. On Wednesday 18 March the TRIGGER project and the BEI School are hosting a networking event designed to explore which institutional changes work best in supporting gender equality in large organisations. The panel’s speakers will reflect on why changes were necessary, what changes have been introduced, the outcome of those changes, and what still needs to happen to improve gender equality. The diversity of speakers will ensure there are opportunities for learning for all.

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Monsters and Phantoms

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This post was contributed by Oyedepo Olukotun a student on Birkbeck’s MA History Of Art with Photography.

In Professor T.J. Clark’s talk Was Picasso a Woman? : Reflections on Nude, Green Leaves and Bust hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on Friday June 7 to accompany the launch of his book Picasso And Truth: From Cubism To Guernica, it soon became clear that Picasso was not gender swapping but was casting himself as a woman artistically. Speaking even artistically, in light of statements Clark attributes to Picasso, the notion of the artist as a woman seemed far-fetched. “I would love to paint like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels” or “Like any artist, I am primarily the painter of woman, and for me, woman is essentially a machine for suffering” did not lend credence to Picasso’s case.

Monsters and Phantoms

In light of the above statements Picasso’s terse “I am a woman” is soon sidelined. However, what proceeded to catch my attention in Professor Clark’s talk, which focused on Picasso’s Nude, Green leaves and Bust (1932) and Nude on a Black Sofa (1932), was Clark’s periodical refrain of “monsters and phantoms”. In Lecture 4 of his book, Clark embarks on an analysis of Picasso’s The Painter and His Model (1927) to explore the artist’s fixation with monsters. At a basic level Clark, in his capacity as a social art historian, aims to divorce Picasso’s art, one painting at a time, from a connoisseurial or biographical interpretation.

The transcendental truth that Clark reveals in Picasso’s paintings is the long tradition of art with the objectification of women. That Western art depicts women the way it does is a practice Picasso inherited from a deep-rooted tradition as the British Museum’s Ice Age art: Arrival of the modern mind exhibition has shown us. That this depiction is because he is artistically a woman and Picasso’s sexualised reasons for his stance made for fascinating and revelatory observation in Clark’s talk. Further on Picasso’s stance aligned with his depiction of women as monsters makes for an interesting juxtaposition in Clark’s book and talk.

Women as Monsters

The practice of depicting women as monsters may or may not have began with Picasso however it is not unique to him. In her article The MoMA’s Hot Mamas Carol Duncan points us in the direction of artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning and Robert Heinecken who, among many, depict women as monstrous, grotesque, menacing and castrating. Duncan uses Picasso’s paintings as a prime example of this genre of women deprecating art; this would have met with the approval of the artist who, according to Clark, was concerned with posterity.

Clark, fascinatingly, traces for us the genealogy and journey of Picasso’s monstrous women and sets us up for the excitement of discovering the truth that transcends autobiography in art which would explain the root of the emotion that has led artists to depict women as monsters.

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