̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jude Browne

Making the numbers count: supporting and engaging women at every career stage

ed515 — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Glass ceilings, glass cliffs, glass escalators… much has been written about the metaphorical glass barrier that stands invisibly yet solidly between women and high-level success across the economy.

It’s a description that exasperates Professor Sucheta Nadkarni from Cambridge Judge Business School.

“ ̽��ֱ��challenges faced by women in business are well documented and fiercely debated, and there’s a tendency for most of this talk to be negative. I call this the doom and gloom narrative – it’s about the barriers that women face and why women fail. Let’s change the conversation about gender equality to focus on the factors that help women
to succeed.”

Nadkarni is the lead academic on a major global research project that reported in the European Business Review last year on the factors that help women to succeed in corporate environments. ̽��ֱ��project gathered data from 1,071 companies in 42 countries, covering 56 industries. ̽��ֱ��information spanned a ten-year period, during which the average percentage of women on executive teams in sampled firms rose from 7.6% to just 11.7%.

̽��ֱ��study highlighted the many benefits that women in senior roles bring to companies. “It’s not just that hiring more women into senior positions is the right thing to do for gender equality, it’s also the smart thing to do from a business perspective,” says Nadkarni.

“We found that bringing more women to top roles can make a business function better, attract new customers and improve the bottom line. Women bring in diverse capabilities, diverse knowledge and new ways of thinking, which organisations need.”

With revelations about the gender pay gap making current headlines – three quarters of the 10,000 firms that have provided information pay men more than women – the inequality problems women continue to face in the labour market are gaining increasing attention.

However, Nadkarni is keen to focus on the future. “ ̽��ֱ��question we need to ask now is: what can we do about this situation of unequal pay and unequal representation, and how can we create a more optimistic, promising picture for our students and for the women who are just starting to rise up?”

Her study considered the economic, political, legislative and cultural forces that determine the number of women in the boardroom in different countries. ̽��ֱ��findings showed that the strongest drivers are ‘female economic power’ and a requirement for gender diversity in a country’s corporate governance code. Maternity provisions and female politicians providing a championing voice for women are also important factors.

Female economic power was measured by the expected years of schooling for women, and the percentage of women in the labour force. ̽��ֱ��results suggest that as women become more highly educated, and gain increasing levels of employment, they play a greater role in the marketplace. This then provides a powerful incentive for companies to hire more women onto the board, to reflect the market they cater for.

Corporate governance codes are a set of best practice recommendations, including gender diversity requirements. In the past decade, codes have been created in 64 countries. Among countries sampled in Nadkarni’s study, Colombia had the highest percentage of women in executive teams, at 28.5%, and Japan ranked bottom with 0.57%.

These codes, says Nadkarni, are one example of a ‘soft’ measure that has been shown to be effective in helping women to gain top roles in executive teams or on management boards. In comparison, ‘hard’ targets – such as the mandatory quotas enforced on companies by several countries to give a percentage of seats on the board to women – do little to support gender diversity, and can also have a negative effect on company cohesion.

“Although quotas can help to improve the representation of women on corporate boards, they do little to help women stay in senior positions long enough to make a real impact, and can have both positive and negative effects on turnover rates,” says Nadkarni. “They can also create a hostile environment, by conveying a sense of ‘preferential treatment’ rather than recognition of hard work, skills and capabilities.”

̽��ֱ��research also uncovered some of the loopholes that companies exploit to meet quota requirements. For example, in countries where family businesses are common, quotas are sometimes fulfilled by appointing female relatives to the board. In one case, an 86-year-old, the daughter of the founder of a company in Turkey, had been on the board since 1964.

Dr Jude Browne, the Jessica and Peter Frankopan Director of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, has constructed a different approach to addressing gender equality that focuses on encouraging diversity at all levels of an organisation rather than simply quota requirements for senior roles.

Browne suggests that “each organisation with significant pay gaps and other segregation patterns needs to begin by building a detailed picture of what it thinks its data ought to look like and, crucially, publish its goals.

“Too many organisations simply collect data, compile aggregate figures that don’t tell us that much and then look to other organisations to see how they compare. Given that a great many are failing to pick up real pace in addressing these patterns, the ‘comparison with competitors approach’ tends to generate a complacent comfort zone around what ought to be, in many cases, unacceptable.”

As Browne set out at the European Commission recently, the ‘Critical Mass Marker’ approach focuses on skilled women who are not advancing to the next level as quickly as one might expect – that is, where critical mass is not having the desired flow effect.

̽��ֱ��approach requires an organisation to undertake a detailed analysis of its workforce and mark out goals that proportionately relate each level to the next, taking critical mass failures into particular account. Organisations would then be required to analyse and explain their continued segregation patterns against their published goals. This might include analysing the different career profiles that various intersectional groups tend to have and the impact of dependant-related responsibilities, reassessing the benchmark criteria for promotion, and comparing those who have worked within the organisation for long periods to newcomers with very different workloads.

“ ̽��ֱ��Critical Mass Marker approach is not going to solve all the segregation problems that organisations tend to have,” she adds. “But it puts a greater onus on them to ensure those equipped with the relevant talents are able to move up and across institutional structures in a more effective and proportionate way than blanket quotas aimed solely at the top layers of management where we often only see the same few women.”

Nadkarni is also keen to see more women supported at every level, and would like to see action to increase the number of women in executive teams, not just on corporate boards.

“Corporate boards are important, but they only play an indirect role in influencing company strategies and performance, because they mainly have an advisory capacity,” she says. “ ̽��ֱ��decisions are made by the executive team. So, if we want companies to benefit, if we want women to really make an impact, then it’s the executive teams that matter.

“In this context, a quote that comes to mind is it’s not about ‘counting the numbers’, it’s about ‘making the numbers count’. In other words, it’s not merely the quantity of women in top positions that matters, but also whether policies are in place at various levels – company, government and corporate governance codes – to ensure that women can make
a true impact in such roles.

“Hopefully in the future we will watch the doom and gloom ebb away as the true benefits of gender equality become crystal clear to everyone.”

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Researchers call for gender equality and career support for women in the workplace, and an end to “the doom and gloom narrative” over their limited numbers.

Hiring more women into senior positions is the right thing to do for gender equality. It’s also the smart thing to do from a business perspective

Sucheta Nadkarni

WOCinTech Chat

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Teaching celebrated across the ̽��ֱ��

ta385 — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 23:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��winners include a veterinary anaesthetist praised for developing an acclaimed Clinical Skills Centre, a pioneer of interdisciplinary Gender Studies programmes, and a Classicist as passionate about outreach as Ovid.

While the prizes reveal the diversity of teaching at Cambridge, certain themes emerge, in particular a focus on the individual student, the value of research-led teaching, the continuing importance of one-to-one teaching, innovation in teaching practice, interdisciplinary approaches, and above all, dedication to students.

̽��ֱ��Pilkington Prizes were initiated by Sir Alastair Pilkington – graduate of Trinity College, engineer, businessman and the first Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation – who passionately believed that teaching excellence was crucial to Cambridge’s future success.

̽��ֱ��Pilkington Prizes are organised by ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning, which supports staff by providing training, developing networks, hosting events and encouraging and funding innovation. ̽��ֱ��Centre also provides a focus for strategic priorities within Cambridge and for engaging with national and international developments in higher education.

New films about teaching at Cambridge

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has produced a series of films about five of this year’s Pilkington Prize winners. These films go behind the scenes to show Cambridge teaching in action as well as inviting winners to explain their passion for teaching and reveal some of their trade secrets. ̽��ֱ��films feature Lecturer in German Thought, Martin Ruehl; Physics Lecturer Lisa Jardine-Wright; Sociologist Mónica Moreno Figueroa; Zoologist Andrew Balmford; and Design Engineer James Moultrie. Watch the films.

Dr Martin Ruehl said:

"I was an undergraduate here myself so I want to give back some of what I received. I had a number of very charismatic teachers who inspired me back then. I think the trick is always to find something that’s growing out of your own research."

Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright said:

"It is only when you start teaching a subject that you really start to understand it and all of its nuances. ̽��ֱ��most important thing for me is that my students are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them."

This year’s winners in full are:

Dr Anthony Ashton (Department of Mathematics)
Dr Jackie Brearley (Department of Veterinary Medicine)
Dr Jude Browne (Department of Politics and International Studies)
Dr Menna Clatworthy (School of Clinical Medicine)
Dr Richard Davies (School of Clinical Medicine)
Dr Ingo Gildenhard (Faculty of Classics)
Dr Nigel Kettley (Institute of Continuing Education)
Professor Jochen Runde (Judge Business School)
Dr Martin Ruehl (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages)
Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright (Department of Physics)
Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa (Department of Sociology)
Professor Andrew Balmford (Department of Zoology)
Dr James Moultrie (Department of Engineering)

Read more about the 2017 Pilkington Prize winners here.

Thirteen Cambridge academics have been recognised for their outstanding teaching in the ̽��ֱ��'s Pilkington Prizes.

"I was an undergraduate here myself so I want to give back some of what I received. I think the trick is always to find something that’s growing out of your own research."

Dr Martin Ruehl, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

Teaching celebrated across the ̽��ֱ��

Dr Martin Ruehl, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Gender’s many faces

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:00:35 +0000

Over the past two years, Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies (UCCGS) has brought together scholars from across the ̽��ֱ�� into a vibrant teaching and research community focused on the understanding of gender. Today, academics from 23 different departments – from the social sciences, humanities and arts, right through to the physical sciences, technology and biomedical sciences – are actively engaged with the Centre, as are an impressive series of visiting international scholars.

Although the Centre has existed for over a decade as a successful public events and postgraduate training resource, an endowment two years ago from Jessica and Peter Frankopan of the Staples Trust enabled it to begin a new and exciting process of development, launching an MPhil course and its own research programme.

Now, with academics from such a broad range of fields contributing to its intellectual landscape, the Centre demonstrates a remarkable and in many ways unique multidisciplinary approach to research and teaching, as Dr Jude Browne, the Centre’s Frankopan Director of Gender Studies, attests: ‘ ̽��ֱ��study of gender at the Centre benefits immensely from having evolved from an engagement with diverse front-line research topics rather than from any one particular discipline, political view or methodology… Gender at the Centre is about all humans whatever their identities, condition or experiences.’

Issues tackled at the Centre encompass this holistic approach and range from what the latest advances in biomedical sciences tell us about gender, to how gender is used in conflict, to what we can learn about gender from antiquity, to how we could combat sexed-based inequalities in the labour markets. ̽��ֱ��result, as Dr Browne describes, is a ‘different, and sometimes clashing, research perspective that gives us a wonderfully encompassing view of the implications of gender.’

From head-hunting to HIV transmission

̽��ֱ��two most recently funded research projects at UCCGS exemplify the extraordinary breadth of gender research.

Dr Browne, whose research was featured at the Hay Festival this year, is a specialist on sex segregation and inequality in the modern labour market. A three-year project she is directing will evaluate gender bias in the assessment and selection of top executives for recruitment (with Monica Wirz, PhD candidate in the Centre). Egon Zehnder International, the largest privately owned executive search firm, has funded the project following their recent finding that the proportion of women on the boards of UK FTSE companies is only 12.6%. ‘It’s dismal how little diversity there is in chief national and international posts,’ comments Dr Browne. ‘We need to link up the thinking behind selection processes at the very highest recruitment levels with that of the latest critical thinking in gender studies.’

Dr Andrew Tucker, Assistant Director of UCCGS, leads a Centre project focusing on HIV transmission in South Africa, which continues to exhibit one of the worst epidemics of HIV. ̽��ֱ��United States Agency for International Development is funding this groundbreaking two-year project through the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. ̽��ֱ��study is aimed at reducing transmission in marginalised at-risk communities in South Africa – specifically men who have sex with men (MSM). What little work has been done on addressing this group’s health needs has focused overwhelmingly on measures such as condom distribution; this project instead plans to examine the benefits of reducing social and economic discrimination, and an endemic sense of fatalism, which affect MSM in township environments.

Bequest to ‘spark young minds’

Thanks to a recent substantial bequest from Professor Carl Djerassi (inventor of the first oral contraceptive pill) in memory of his late wife Diane Middlebrook, the community of Cambridge researchers working on gender is being extended by the launch of the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies, bringing internationally renowned scholars to the Centre. ̽��ֱ��first to visit is Professor Marcia Inhorn, a leading medical anthropologist from Yale ̽��ֱ�� whose research focuses on ‘reproductive tourism’ – the search for assisted reproductive technologies and human eggs, sperm and embryos across national and international borders.

During their research period at UCCGS, each Visiting Professor will explore opportunities for continuing collaborative research with the Centre and offer guidance and intellectual leadership to junior researchers and students. As Professor Djerassi remarks: ‘What better way of honoring the memory of my wife than bringing great teachers from all over the world to spark younger minds.’

For more information, please contact Dr Jude Browne (jmb63@cam.ac.uk) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies (www.gender.cam.ac.uk/) in the Department of Geography.

New funding and a generous bequest are helping researchers in Cambridge to explore the complexities of how gender works in the world.

Gender at the Centre is about all humans whatever their identities, condition or experiences.

Dr Jude Browne

©Alamy.com

Vigeland Frogner Park Oslo Norway

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

All things being equal

bjb42 — Thu, 27 May 2010 07:47:07 +0000

British employment legislation is anachronistic and out of sync with 21^st century parenting, says Jude Browne, Frankopan Director of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.

She is interested in how philosophical principles of inequality which underpin our laws translate into legislative practice, with a particular focus on gender equality.

Her talk at the Guardian Hay Festival will focus on the principle of equal treatment, which is a bedrock of EU equality policies. Investigating the principle throws up several interesting practicalities, such as how to think about the ways in which people should be treated more equally. Browne is interested in how current UK law seems to act against equality by forcing men and women into particular roles and denying them a full range of choice over how they conduct their family life.

She highlights legislation around maternity and paternity leave as a case in point. ̽��ֱ��inequality between women having months off work and men only having two weeks out of the workplace “herds people into traditional roles,” she says. “People have no choice unless they are very rich.”

This leads to all sorts of inequalities and potential discrimination in the workplace, with women of childbearing age viewed by some employers as a risky, expensive option, compared with men.

Browne says that the law should be about giving people the choice over how they wish to operate as a family unit, adding that the majority of households are now dual-earning. In many cases, both couples work full time and men want to be more involved in parenting.

She has little time for people who use generalisations to defend conservative legislation: “There is no single minded category,” she says. “I am very sceptical of assuming what people want. Men and women make decisions based on all sorts of factors. There are a whole range of scenarios.”

“ ̽��ֱ��law at present is very prescriptive about what men and women should be doing as parents and traps people into social norms despite the fact that attitudes have changed so much.”

Maternity legislation has undergone several changes in recent years; for instance, it was recently extended to one year in length. Browne says this is all very well and good if women want to take a year out, but in the absence of legislation allowing men to take similar time out for parenting duties, it might make a return to work for women more difficult and hence increase inequality in the workplace.

“There has to be a holistic approach to this issue,” says Browne. “ ̽��ֱ��legislation has to be properly thought through as it has a huge impact on the way people are able to organise their lives.”

Her talk fits with the multidisciplinary ethos of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. ̽��ֱ��idea is to bring together research and innovation on everything from law and philosophy to reproductive science and literature. One way the Centre is doing this is through a collaboration with the Guardian newspaper at the beginning of next term. They will jointly play host to three lectures on gender and the biomedical advances in the 21st century at the Guardian's offices in King's Place, London.

̽��ֱ��talks, which will be given by leading researchers aim to provide an open dialogue with the public so that they can understand the potential impact of scientific advances on society and their implications for gender.

Dr. Jude Browne will be speaking at the Hay Festival on June 6^th at 1pm.

UK law is different for men and women on issues such as maternity or paternity leave. Dr. Jude Browne’s research asks about whether our gender roles are being prescribed for us, and what needs to change in the interests of a more balanced and fair society.

Dennis from flickr

Ben's Crib

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes