The final reports

Action 2 of the Agender project finished in September 2007 the final report looking soft indicators will be available from the Agender website shortly.

Action 3 work is well underway with tracking of a sample of beneficiaries taking place as I type. This will be availble as a report in the New Year.

Social footprints

Tomorrow I am presenting at the 'Social footprints' symposium at the ICC in Birmingham - this is a free event for Businesses, academics and policy makers to gather and report on various research relating to corporate social responsibility, work/life balance and various other related topics. I am doing a turn:

Challenging Gender Stereotypes in the Workplace; what the soft indicators tell us?

This will be reporting on some research I have carried out over the last couple of years on behalf of the Agender project. Here I have been immersed in the project, from chairing an EU working group looking at 'Women into non-traditional employment' to being part of the UK, specifically Birmingham based, working groups looking at: how we might better support women into some of these roles and as a researcher interviewing the participants throughout the lifetime of the project to capture the: 'soft indicators of distance travelled'. Some of this work has involved a film school, some has looked at construction and sports coaching. Each have their individual characteristics in terms of barriers and opportunities.

So much has happened

It has been a really long time since I last posted to this blog! That is not to say that the Agender project has been quiet or my work with in it. I have been heavily involved in the transnational work and soon we will have a DVD available of case studies of WINGS (our transnational name) beneficiaries.

I am busy tracking the participants of the project and some interesting findings are emerging from the project. Issues around how women feel about working in non-gender traditional work places the types of support they might need including assertiveness (more on this later), issues relating to culture and cultural expectations (some surprises here) and some not surprising issues around childcare.

I will try very hard to update and substantiate on these points as I begin to draw out these conclusions for my final report due at the end of September.

But for now back to the interviews and tracking...

Issues across Europe

A delegation from the Agender project DP (Development Partnership) recently returned from a workshop with our German, Catalan and Italian partners in the Rhur region of Germany. This proved an extremely interesting and focussed set of working meetings. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the issues in each country and how we as a trans-national partnership can work together.

From the group that I was in an interesting issue unfolded, we were looking at women into non-traditional job roles. Across Europe this is a problem with each country having it's own set of issues, barriers and subtle differences as to why women are not in non-traditional roles. This comparison proved useful as we hope to learn and be informed by each others different approaches to breaking down these barriers.

The work I am doing in the project is looking at the journey of the participants, the soft indicators, capturing the distance travelled, i.e how they as individuals have grown in for example self-confidence, aspirations and ability to confidently enter a job which has otherwise been a male-domain. The approach to this work will be to interview the beneficiaries throughout the process, their trainers and organisations involved. What emerged in Germany was that this approach, if captured in the right format, could be a useful tool for raising awareness amongst other women. i.e. those beneficiaries’ become role models.

From an international perspective this gave out to some interesting issues. How well would, for example, a women from Birmingham’s experience translate? not just in terms of language but in terms of experience and culturally, to women from other countries. A clue was given by our Catalan colleagues who had created a video of two female Electrician/plumbers being interviewed about their experiences of working in a male dominated environment, the film had English sub-titles. Although not tested out amongst UK beneficiaries the women, their stories and the challenges they'd faced were extremely engaging and their confidence and enthusiasm for their work was evident regardless of the language barrier.

Creative Women

Another piece of research that has come to my attention recently, relates to several of the projects that I work on, but has particular salience with the Agender projects potential work with the BBC. This piece of research was recently carried out in Scotland and identified a number of key barriers and employment trends of women trying to work in this sector. In brief some particularly salient points that relate to the Agender project:

1. Only a minority of the case study companies had formal gender-related policies in place.

2. Where policies did exist, employees were somewhat vague
Informal, family-friendly cultures, although employees generally spoke positively of these informal approaches.

3. It was felt that flexible working would be difficult, if not impossible: in client-focused roles (e.g. in public relations and in commercial radio sales); in roles requiring almost constant interaction with colleagues and/or subordinates; in deadline-orientated roles; and in roles requiring long and unsociable hours (e.g. in theatre and in film and TV production).

4. Occupational segregation is evident - women are under-represented in the technical occupations and women are perceived to be better in production role

5. Older women are sidelined for younger women particularly in front of the camera

6. Long hours, short contracts difficult to maintain a work-life balance

7. 62% of the women had experienced unequal treatment in the workplace

8. 56% had faced gender-related barriers


The full report will beavailablee from their website soon.


Ref: Gender Barriers in the Scottish Creative Industries,
Seminar Proceedings, February 2006
Aberdeenbusinesss School, The Robert Gordon University
Rita Marcella, Lorraine Illingworth and Graeme Baxter

Women in work

Earlier this month the Women and Work comission published there 'Sharing a frairer futre' report'. Which shed light on some rather startling statisitics, namely that women still earn on average a 17%less than their male counterparts.

Something that is particularly intersting from the Agender perspective is this quote from the report:

The Commission estimates that removing barriers to women working in
occupations traditionally done by men, and increasing women’s participation in the labour market, could be worth between £15 billion and £23 billion or 1.3 to 2.0 per cent of GDP.
(Women in work, 2006)
And to this end here is one of many recomendations, that fits exactly with the Agender projects objectives:

The Sector Skills Councils should workwith employers on providing and
promoting Apprenticeships for women in industries where there are skills shortages.
The development of a comprehensive plan to tackle the segregation of jobs, into
those mostly done by one gender or the other, should be part of every Sector Skills
Agreement.
(Women in work, 2006)
This is just an initiallook at this report and as I read through the entire 148 pages of it there is sure to be more to report on but for now you can
get the full report here.

Women in Construction

As I find them, I will post what I consider to be interesting snippets, from pieces of research that I come across relating to non-traditional job roles, the following are from a 1999 study of womens' experiences of working in the UK construction sector:


Women's careers in large construction companies: expectations unfulfilled?
Andrew R.J. Dainty, Richard H. Neale, Barbara M. Bagilhole. Career Development International. Bradford: 1999.Vol.4, Iss. 7; pg. 353

1. 'Rather, they tended to have been the subject of targeted recruitment campaigns or had read literature specifically aimed at attracting them to the industry. Consequently, they had a poor initial understanding of the culture of the industry, and the inherent difficulties of working in such a male dominated environment. Furthermore, construction higher education, which for most formed the interface between career choice and working in the industry, was found to have provided a sheltered environment, and to have presented a sanitised view of the realities of working life in the sector.'

2. 'these managers were invariably male, and were inexperienced in contemporary HRM practice. They had stereotyped expectations of women's career priorities, and preferred to recruit men, whom they saw as being more likely to conform to their own work ethics.'

3. 'Construction work was seen as demanding, time-consuming and as impinging on social and family activities'



Ref; Women's careers in large construction companies: expectations unfulfilled?
Andrew R.J. Dainty, Richard H. Neale, Barbara M. Bagilhole. Career Development International. Bradford: 1999.Vol.4, Iss. 7; pg. 353

The Agender Project

Welcome to the Blog for the research arm of the EQUAL Agender project. Here I will share my thoughts and ongoing issues that arise from the project. More coming as I get it.