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What are UK women's groups like? Who do they appeal to? How do they compare with each other?

Women's increased participation in the workforce over the last ten years is clearly reflected in the growth and widening scope of the Women and Training Group, set up in 1979 with the Manpower Services Commission's support to provide a forum for national training bodies to exchange information, ideas and experiences on women's training opportunities. An overview of the Group's history and achievements to date underlines its ability to appraise and reflect the changing scene for women and organisations constantly. Forward strategy includes becoming more involved with policy makers in organisations, closer liaison with professional associations and wider representation at major events and on policy making groups. The aim is also to enable men and women to work together as equals, adopting a more integrated approach in the process.

This chapter examines the tension between interdependence and dominance. First, we briefly review prominent social psychological theories regarding the development and maintenance of status systems. Next we briefly describe how these structures help distribute social power in modern society. We then examine how prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination stem from status systems and interdependence, using the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Xu, Cuddy & Glick, 1999; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002). Next, we consider the unique circumstances of gender relations and how they give way to complementary justifications of gender inequality, using Ambivalent Sexism Theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996, 1999, 2001a, 2001b). Last, we review evidence to support our argument that women do not necessarily acquiesce joyfully to the present hierarchical arrangement, but rather guide their choices by their pragmatic alternatives, as dictated by benevolent and hostile ideologies.

Activists understand that achieving social reform via advocacy campaigns requires competencies in a wide range of cultural and political venues. However, differences in movement organizations’ identities and subsequent strategy choices often lead to inter-organizational conflict that detracts from achieving the desired reform goals. In this study, the argument is presented that the exchange of resources, such as proficiencies and skills derived from organizational specialization, in combination with strong personal ties between the organizations’ leadership structure, which forge a degree of trust despite ideological differences, will lead to cooperation. To understand when groups engage in strategic resource exchange and inter-organizational cooperation within a particular issue field, several women’s rights action campaigns organized by women’s groups in New Delhi, India are analyzed. The qualitative data utilized in this chapter consist of in-depth interviews with members of several women’s groups as well as organizational documents; thus, enabling a process-tracing approach to support the argument that personal ties drive the formation of informal inter-group coalition building to advance women’s rights in India.

Most fashion advertising in the UK uses and targets young, slim women (and/or men). The purpose of this paper research is to ask whether this approach is relevant and appropriate to older women, who make up a large and growing segment of the market, and who generally have more disposable income to spend on clothes.

Adapted qualitative techniques were used to examine two groups of women, one younger and one older. The Contour Drawing Rating Scale was used to examine the women's self‐image and the ideal size they perceived models should be. Triadic Sorting with laddering interviews revealed how the women perceived some recent adverts.

Although the older women, on the whole, were larger than the younger women, they displayed a greater level of satisfaction and contentment with their body's size and appearance. Both groups felt that fashion models should be larger than they are currently and the older women, in particular, felt that the advert using “normal‐sized” women was the most effective in selling product.

Directed towards the creators of fashion advertising and fashion retailers, this research was one of the first attempts to uncover how older women view fashion advertising. It reveals that while older women do not necessarily expect to see women of their own age in adverts they do require that the models are more reflective of “normal‐sized” women going about “normal” activities. In short, to interest them in the products being sold, they need advertising to be relevant to their everyday lives, without being condescending or resorting to escapism.

This paper represents one of the first research studies in the UK to explore older “normal” women and their perceptions of body‐image related to fashion advertising. It also uses specifically adapted qualitative methods to achieve its purpose.

This study aims to examine how women's groups help women to navigate context-related barriers to their engagement in rural entrepreneurship. The paper combines the contextualisation of entrepreneurship framework and the feminist separatist theory to describe how women's groups in patriarchal rural communities enable women to circumvent context-related barriers and actively engage in rural entrepreneurship.

Based on a case study of 12 women's groups engaged in paddy farming, rice processing and marketing in rural Tanzania, this study draws on semi-structured interviews with 46 women, four focus group discussions, four in-depth key informant interviews and non-participant observation.

Rural women face unique context-related challenges that hinder them from effectively participating in rural entrepreneurship. Specifically, limited access to farmlands and profitable markets, lack of business networks, limited time, poverty and insufficient financial resources constrain women's engagement in entrepreneurship. To overcome these contextual barriers, rural women have organised themselves into groups to gain access to business services, business-related training, grants and business networks.

This study contributes to the existing literature on contextualising entrepreneurship by focussing on how rural contexts may constrain women's entrepreneurial engagement while showing how women respond to contextual barriers that enable them to participate in rural entrepreneurship.

This study shows that women with low education can pursue rural entrepreneurship if they are supported through training and access to networks. This will support the performance of these groups of women.

This study offers new insights into the role of women's groups in navigating gender-related constraints that hinder women from participating in rural entrepreneurship within the patriarchal context of low-income countries. Thus, new perceptions for the gender and rural entrepreneurship theory and the policy implications thereof are proffered.

The purpose of this article is to describe the development of a Nurse-led Long-term Support Group (NLLTSG) as an intervention for Latina women survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) as well as to discuss a process for facilitation.

Yalom’s (2005) group therapy principles guided the creation of the NLLTSGs. According to Yolam, interaction with others and sharing stories reinforces connections within group members and leads to interpersonal learning (Yalom, 2005).

Latina women survivors of IPV do not have adequate support post IPV relationships. In this case study, the authors describe the process for developing and facilitating a NLLTSG for Latina women survivors.

The case study intervention only included Latina women living in the US Texas–Mexico border. Questions remain regarding the effectiveness of LTNLSGs with women from other cultures and geographic regions.

Nurses, nurse practitioners and other professionals can partner with community service agencies to offer this vital intervention to support and empower Latina women survivors and their families. Implications for future research include theory development and quantitative studies to measure empowerment and healing in Latina women survivors of IPV. The intervention and process should expand to include women of other cultures and geographic region.

The case study established a NLLTSG as an effective intervention for initiating and maintaining a NLLTSG with Latina women survivors of IPV as well. NLLTSGs seem to be an essential intervention for recovery in this vulnerable population.

The content of this paper describes an innovative, culturally sensitive, practitioner-engaged response to intimate partner violence in Latina women survivors.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to isolate a new mechanism (i.e. underestimation judgments) through which gender (percentage of women in a group in particular) influences group synergy, or the extent to which groups are able to perform better than their composing members. Second, it aims to explore further the extent to which underestimation judgments are prone to change and adjustment as a result of participating in social contexts, such as groups.

The sample consisted of 278 student participants (161 women), nested within 66 groups. Participants performed a series of cognitive tasks with correct answers and had to rate how confident they were in the answers given.

Gender composition in terms of percentage of women is positively related to underestimation within groups and this negatively affects group synergy. The data also show that women underestimate less or improve the accuracy of their performance self-evaluation judgments after group interaction, thereby highlighting a factor (group experience) that helps women gain greater accuracy about their performance.

Further research could explore the extent to which underestimation judgments are present in various organizational contexts and the extent to which they are prone to change.

Organizations and universities are invited to reflect on the relevance of self-beliefs (and underestimation in particular) on the accomplishment of cognitive tasks. Practices and policies should be geared toward the enhancement of self-knowledge accuracy, with a particular focus on the female population.

This paper identifies a new mechanism through which gender influences group synergy: underestimation judgments.

In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine their own reproductive fate (Rothman, 2000, p. 73). Decades later Barbara Katz Rothman reflected on the social, political and legal changes produced by reproductive-rights feminists since that time. She wrote: So the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1970s won, and abortion is available – just as the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1920s won, and contraception is available. But in another sense, we did not win. We did not win, could not win, because Sanger was right. What we really wanted was the fundamental revolt, the “key to the temple of liberty.” A doctor’s fitting for a diaphragm, or a clinic appointment for an abortion, is not the revolution. It is not even a woman-centered approach to reproduction (2000, p. 79).

Scholars and activists working both within and outside the massive health-related machinery of government and the private sector and within and outside communities of color address the same fundamental questions: Why do health disparities exist? Why have they persisted over such a long time? What can be done to significantly reduce or eliminate them?