Author Archives: A Youngson

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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Who doesn’t want to learn? Reflections from Learning at Work Week

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This post was contributed by Annette McCone, Widening Access Manager at Birkbeck, University of London. This blog was originally posted at UnionLearn

I remember fondly one of my first Learning at Work events at Balham Job Centre Plus hosted by one of the most vivacious union learning reps (ULRs) I have had the pleasure to work with. She had put on a fantastic day of events to include salsa dancing, massages, manicures. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to be able to bring to life our prospectuses with quite the same passion and panache.

Fortunately, one of the staff had already studied with Birkbeck, starting on our Certificate of Higher Education, progressing to his BA History and now studying a PhD. He took full advantage of the tannoy system and encouraged his colleagues to come and speak to me, which they did.

Happiness and Wellbeing-at Work

Happiness and Wellbeing-at Work

It never surprises me to learn that two fifths of our first-year students have heard about Birkbeck from word of mouth and over 92% of our students recommend us to their friends and family. I believe it’s because we genuinely know how to support adults who want to return to study no matter their motivation – career change, career progression coupled with a real desire to develop personally.

But it wasn’t just the staff who learned something that day, I realised Birkbeck needed to work much harder at providing adults in the workplace with a flavour of higher education which led to the Well-Being at Work and Get Started initiatives.

The Well Being project offers a series of workshops exploring the “Big Seven” of Well-being identified by Professor Richard Layard:

  • family and friends,
  • community,
  • health,
  • work,
  • financial situation,
  • autonomy and
  • belief systems.

The project pools the different skill sets and experiences of academics working at the cutting edge of research. Over the past three years, we have delivered this with HMRC, Southwark Council, Brent Children’s Services and of course, Balham Job Centre Plus.

But we realised that, whilst this might have helped to ignite interest in different subjects, it still didn’t really help provide the practical information people needed to get started. So, we decided to implement a monthly workshop, which provides information on fees and funding, advice on how to prepare for university study and practical tips and hints on making a successful application.

Essentially, this means providing adults with the information and advice given readily to young school leavers. Again, this has proven really effective to adult returners with 50% of attendees going on to apply, equating to approximately 300 learners each year.
But success isn’t just about how many people sign up for a Birkbeck course after we’ve met with them. We understand there is too much to consider to take this decision lightly.

This is why it is important to make long lasting and meaningful partnerships. It is vital we keep working with ULRs and visit the same workplaces each year so people understand Birkbeck will always be an option for them. Just don’t forget to invite us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBWZ0H9uaZ0

If you want to find out more about Birkbeck’s courses come along to the Open Evening on 25 June from 4pm until 7.30pm, at the Royal National Hotel, London.

Boom, Bust, Boom!

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This post was contributed by Rose Devaney, Business Engagement and Impact Manager at Birkbeck’s School of Business, Economics and Informatics

Boom-Bust-Boom-webThe Birkbeck Cinema recently screened Boom, Bust, Boom, the latest documentary on the 2008 financial crisis. The film focuses on the behavioural elements of consumers in creating a “bubble” which ultimately bursts, and uses a historical canter through various financial meltdowns to demonstrate that we seem hard-wired to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Bubbles burst

Our ability to suspend rationality and believe that investments will keep increasing in value can be traced back as far as the Tulip Mania of 1637, followed by the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the British Railway Mania of the 1940s and the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929. Even intellectual royalty including Isaac Newton was caught out when the South Sea Bubble burst, losing over two million pounds by today’s standards.

What’s interesting is that crises tend to occur with enough distance between them to be managed by an entirely new generation. They have heard the stories about the previous “bust” – but haven’t lived it – and arrogantly think they know better.

The post-film audience debate raised questions about the film’s omission of consideration of such things as the role of the banks, de-regulation, traders and globalisation – which all contributed to the crisis. But response to the film was overwhelmingly positive and it was agreed that the “euphoria” that a boom creates is a potent ingredient that was illustrated brilliantly throughout the documentary.

Jones and Minsky

My two heroes from the afternoon were Terry Jones and Hyman Minsky. Jones, a founding member of the Monty Python team, was the film’s co-writer and co-director and morphed into a clear and credible narrator. No doubt, he was largely responsible for the puppetry and visuals which provided light relief from the interviews with various economists and illustrated complicated concepts and power imbalances.

Minsky, an American economist, who was at the height of his career during America’s most stable and prosperous times during the 1950s and 1960s, predicted the slow movement of financial systems from stability to fragility when nobody wanted to listen. The irony of his book becoming somewhat of a best-seller during the recent recession was not lost on his son, one of the film’s contributors.

Even monkeys prefer something for nothing

The political soundbites were fairly minimal but used to good effect. Bill Clinton creating the National Home Ownership strategy that was a contributing factor in the American Sub-prime crisis; Gordon Brown declaring no return to “boom and bust” and George Bush describing the US economy as “healthy and vigorous, the envy of the world” – just before the arrival of the 2008 global financial crisis.

And what about those monkeys? Residents of Monkey Island and subjects of experiments demonstrate that, even when the outcomes of two situations are identical, even monkeys choose the route where it appears they are getting something for nothing, as opposed to the one where they perceive something is being taken away. It’s suggested that somehow our psychology distorts our rational judgement and decision-making and we naturally gravitate towards gain and away from the extra emotional energy which loss creates.

A pertinent question from the audience was about whether lessons have been learned and it was suggested that unless you personally experience the pain of the situation, you bounce back quickly and put it all down to experience.

This week, I read about Clinton commanding £330,000 for a 30 minute talk on world hunger and Dick Fuld now running a small New York hedge fund and presenting about life at Lehman Brothers. I doubt the real victims of the American sub-prime crisis, many now unemployed, with a poor credit rating and without the safety net of welfare and health benefits have found it as easy to re-invent themselves.

With special thanks to Sue Konzelmann, Reader at Birkbeck and Director of the London Centre for Corporate Governance and Ethics, who organised the screening and gave an introductory address.

Dr Konzelmann has authored two books (titles below) and will write ‘Labour, Finance and Inequality: The Changing Nature of Economic Policy in Britain’. (with S. Deakin, M. Fovargue-Davies and F. Wilkinson) Oxford: Routledge (forthcoming).

‘The Economics of Austerity’. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014.

‘Banking Systems in the Crisis: The Faces of Liberal Capitalism’. (with Marc Fovargue-Davies) Oxford: Routledge, 2013. 

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‘Deborah Levy: Form and Content in the 21st-Century Novel’

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This post was contributed by Laura Garmeson, who recently completed a Masters in European Literature at the University of Cambridge. She recently attended the Arts Week 2015 event on Deborah Levy: Form and content in the 21st Century Novel

Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy

In Sigmund Freud’s famous case study of the ‘Wolf Man’, Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff is said to suffer a mysterious aversion to butterflies. On further examination, the patient reveals that he also becomes extremely agitated every day at around five o’ clock in the afternoon.

What connects these two phenomena? Freud sees the link lurking between the twin fears embodied when a butterfly alights on a branch before him, its wings spread at rest in a gentle ‘V’ shape – which happens to resemble the Roman numeral for ‘5’.

Deborah Levy’s writing draws on the strange storytelling of psychoanalysis in exploring how we are all fatally wired to create connections. Her work ripples with currents of the unconscious which distort outer surfaces and can threaten to pull the world within the novel entirely out of shape.

Taking risks

This talk with one of Britain’s most exciting living writers was unsurprisingly well-attended. Besides butterflies, Levy spoke of many facets of the writing process and the mind, deftly quoting J. G. Ballard, Flaubert, Duras, Rilke, García Márquez, Proust and many others, every word devoured whole by a hungry audience of creative writing students (the talk was, incidentally, a public feature of the Birkbeck MA summer term lecture series).

Decrying the ‘tyranny of narrative’ and extolling the taking of risks, for Deborah Levy there is no such thing as a comfort zone.

Budding twenty-first-century authors take note (and, believe me, they were): ‘Contemporary narrative is in a state of mutation and renaissance’. Levy recalls writing about globalisation and migration in her first novel Beautiful Mutants on a typewriter in the eighties, using carbon paper so that she could retain a copy of the manuscript.

Now, she writes on Apple products and the pages themselves migrate soundlessly across various technologies. She used to plumb public libraries whilst researching her writing. Now, she googles obsessively.

One of the double-edged swords of the Wikipedia age is that we can all be ‘amateur experts’ in anything. For Levy, the line to tread lies between needing facts ‘to tune the reality levels of my books so I can do a deal with the reader and subvert that reality’, and veering away from ‘hyperintelligible, readable writing that has tragically died in the crib’.

“Embodiment is what makes ideas come alive.”

As a steely, soft-spoken critic of literary orthodoxy, Levy has a gift for languidly dismissive metaphors. Coherence is ‘the bloody, mauled fox’ of the writing process, while rigid narrative convention is ‘a sort of painkiller’ resulting all too often in the ‘sacrifice of poetry on the altar of plot’.

This distrust of tradition was nurtured by an avant-garde theatre training; she learned to write plays at the Dartington College of Arts where she was taught by some of the leading exponents in modern dance. This training has given her words a particular flesh and sinew, and such embodiment is central to her work. When an audience member asked Levy to elaborate on this she replied, simply, that ‘embodiment is what makes ideas come alive.’

In pursuit of ‘a language that does not sanitise or flatten or fix the stranger ways we experience the everyday’ Levy frequently turns to the visual. Her internal language is cinematic rather than literary: ‘image is always what excites me’.

Novels such as Billy and Girl (1996) and the Booker Prize shortlisted Swimming Home (2011) are awash with vivid panoramas and painfully intimate close-ups, with Levy pulling focus through the reckless lenses of her characters’ psyches. These ‘fractured identities’ are the writer’s mask – ‘their task is to think for me’ – but they can also surprise their creator. The wonder of Levy’s cinematic language on the page is that it is multi-angular yet laced with omission; it is a narrative which chooses to perform, often viscerally, rather than describe.

Levy closed the Q&A with a recommendation to the room to read Freud’s case studies. And many of the creative writing students attending this talk will do just that, leaving enthralled in the knowledge that since there can be no single shape for human consciousness, there can be no single shape for the twenty-first-century novel. It is all in the strange series of connections we make.

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