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There are significantly fewer women than men in managerial positions, mainly project management. This problem is noticeable in the construction and engineering sectors, traditionally male-dominated industries with leadership much dependent on masculine qualities. This study examines the obstacles to the career progression of professional female project managers (PFPMs) in the Ghanaian construction industry.

Twenty potential obstacles to women's career progression in the construction industry were identified from a comprehensive review of the literature. A questionnaire was prepared and administered among eighty project managers who work in large construction firms in Ghana. Data obtained were analysed using one sample t-test, Kendall's concordance test, Chi-square test and exploratory factor analysis.

The findings suggest the significance of all the twenty factors as potential obstacles to the career progression of PFPMs. The exploratory factor analysis identified five underlying grouped obstacles: “leadership and human capital related issues”, “issues related to discrimination of all forms”, “career aspiration and planning issues”, “female related role conflicts”, and “recruitment and selection issues”.

The subjective nature of the views of the respondents could influence the evaluation of the obstacles. With this study only exploring the dimensions underlying the significant obstacles, future studies could examine the interrelationships between the various obstacles and move on to determine their impacts on the career progression of professional female PMs as well.

Having an in-depth understanding of these obstacles, stakeholders and other industry practitioners in Ghana could make informed decisions on measures to put in place to address some of these critical issues to raise the standard of professional female PMs in the construction industry. Policymakers and gender advocates in Ghana could also take up some of the critical obstacles identified and provide suitable strategies to educate and create the needed awareness of the industry on those obstacles. Practically, the findings from this study can be valuable for informing decision-making at different management levels in the construction industry.

With country-specific (Ghana) obstacles identified, the findings significantly contribute to the literature on the career advancement of females in the construction sector.

This chapter offers a reflection in the form of a three-way dialogue, exploring how peer mentoring supports our aim to contribute to the delivery of two interconnected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 3 (Health and well-being) and 11 (Sustainable cities and communities). These goals have been a constant in our practices (as heritage, public health and education professionals), and working together has been pivotal to achieving goals. The reflection is based on the collaborative experience of the three authors since 2016, recognizing how mentoring has shaped the different projects we have imagined and delivered together. Our reflection and experience engage with the notion of ‘authentic mentoring’, whereby we support each other and contribute to each other's gaps in knowledge and practice. This has occurred in a very informal and organic way, outside of more traditional definitions of mentoring, where a certain hierarchy of knowledge transmission is usually expected. This chapter narrates our collaborations across various projects and focuses on the most recent one, Outreach to Ownership (O2O) (2023), delivered for Historic England using Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Student as Partners (SaP) as our main philosophical and methodological frameworks. The O2O project allowed us to reflect on how we worked together and with our students. The students' role has evolved from peer mentors and mentees to authentic collaborators.

Gender bias and stereotypes are universal issues in today’s society. This study presents a comprehensive review of women’s leadership based on bibliometric analysis. The feminist approach to leadership is helpful in many ways, and it could be the type of leadership needed in the challenging world of academia. Women present unique characteristics and traits, particularly their motherly approach to leadership.

A review of the literature based on bibliometric analysis by mapping the knowledge structure of the subject is conferred by uncovering the past, present and future trends based on three bibliometric analyses.

The finding suggests that gender equality, stereotypes and barriers in women’s leadership are at the forefront of the subject in HEIs. The overall system, mindset and willingness for institutional transformation are needed to change the mindset of accepting women as leaders of HEIs.

This study brought the significant idea of increasing women’s empowerment in HEIs, eventually strengthening institutional leadership’s capability towards advanced education.

This study would present a crucial foundation in women’s empowerment, particularly from the HEIs perspective and from the generic women’s leadership literature.

The paper focusses on the intrapersonal vs environmental barriers to women's career advancement to the top leadership positions in the information and communication technology (ICT) business and envisages the individual, organisational as well as societal practices for overcoming such barriers in the given sector.

The study relies on the qualitative research method of expert interviews with top-level women managers in the leading ICT companies in Lithuania. The study allowed identifying and structuring the key barriers to women's careers and three-level practices for overcoming them.

The research has shown that the key intrapersonal barriers are related to the lack of self-confidence and perceived glass ceiling. The main environmental barriers are male domination and socially gendered professions. The practices for overcoming women's career barriers can be categorised into three levels – individual, organisational and societal. The study has shown that the most important individual practices are the ability to continuously self-educate and self-affirmation. On the organisational level, the following key practices can be applied: mentorship and inclusive company culture. The societal practices for improving women's career advancement in ICT are mainly represented by the visibility of successful leaders as role models and initiatives increasing awareness for an inclusive society.

The research limitations are largely related to the research sample selected for the qualitative research (interviews). The respondents are already established in the top leadership positions, so may only have a retrospective view on the obstacles to the respondents' careers. A larger sample could provide a more generalisable data, whilst a larger number of interview participants for preselected categories, like company category or tenure in a position, would provide insights on the different stages of career growth and company's influence for the individual's growth. The authors encourage extending research to other sectoral and national contexts.

The research sets out the key barriers that can be overcome with the help of individual, organisational and societal practices. This provides a comprehensive list of practices that can be adopted by the organisations (in the ICT and beyond), as well as the policy makers on the societal level.

Addressing the issues of gender balance and women's career advancement in one of the fastest growing industries (ICT) has profound social implications. Qualitative research has shown how the barriers can be overcome at different levels of the social system.

The paper marks one of the first attempts to introduce a three-level approach to addressing the intrapersonal and environmental barriers to the advancement of women's careers with a particular focus on the ICT sectoral context.

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.

Literature around the careers of female academics is targeted mainly toward identifying and examining career progression inhibitors, while the drivers appear largely unexplored. This paper aims to contribute to contemporary knowledge by identifying drivers to the career progression of female academics in Australia. With COVID-19 currently impacting the careers of female academics this knowledge can assist universities and human resource (HR) professionals in developing policies and practices to better facilitate female academic career progression.

Empirically this paper draws on a qualitative study of 18 male and 29 female academics, as well as nine senior university stakeholders. The authors employed semi-structured interviews and a novel methodology, Draw, Write, Reflect.

In line with attribution theory, senior stakeholders mainly identified organisational efforts, including leadership, gender equity endeavours, recruitment and promotion approaches, as well as a construct known as “relative to opportunity considerations”, as drivers of female academics’ career progression. Female academics, however, largely attributed their career progression to personal factors, such as family support, informal mentoring, and determination and persistence.

The findings have implications for universities and HR practices seeking to facilitate female academic career progression. Implementation of the drivers identified may enhance female academics’ abilities to progress their careers.

By focussing on the drivers of, rather than the barriers to, female academic careers, the research is novel in its identification of a previously unexplored mismatch between organisational attribution and individual attribution of career progression drivers thereby advancing knowledge of gender differences in academic careers.

This study aims to examine the political, economic, social and technological (PEST) factors of women empowerment in the context of rural development under the initiatives of the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM).

The unit of analysis for this study is 459 samples. Non-probability sampling technique has been used for this study. Schedule/questionnaires have been circulated among the women in each block cluster. Frequencies have been used to represent the data against each statement. Non-parametric chi-square test has been used to examine the relationship between empowerment and political, economic, social, technological factors and interpersonal skills.

Statistical analysis shows that the Deendayal Antayodaya Yojana (DAY)-NRLM scheme has brought significant changes and development to women in political, social, economic and technological areas. It was observed that women are economically empowered and contribute to the economic upliftment of the family. Most of the respondents strongly felt that after being associated with DAY-NRLM, they were empowered to contribute efficiently to the social development process and activities.

The findings of this study highlight the impact of DAY-NRLM implementation at block levels of a district in India. Subsequent research may be carried to measure the effectiveness of the capacity-building program conducted under the banner of DAY-NRLM.

Women empowerment is not limited to awareness, whereas it needs a complete set of initiatives backed with support systems. Few critical interventions could be building strong networks, enhancing financial management, encouraging the spirit of entrepreneurship among self-help group workers, providing easy access to credit, mentoring, handholding, continuous monitoring and evaluation.

This study focuses on the impact of the DAY-NRLM scheme on women’s empowerment in the Morigaon district. The inferences from the study throw light on the empowerment of women vis-à-vis political, economic, social and technological factors.

This study is a primary study conducted in the Morigaon District of Assam. This is a new line of policy research that approaches the women empowerment with the PEST parameters.

The closing chapter offers additional reflection on two substantial threads which run throughout the volume. Firstly, quality education (SDG4). Contributors to the volume have articulated with varying degrees of explicitness what quality education means in their specific contexts. Complementary perspective is offered in the closing chapter, through the inclusion of personal interpretations from two students in their last but one year of high school in the United Kingdom. The students are reflecting back on a week of work experience in a university and looking forward to their university journey. Amrita Narang has kindly provided a response to these personal reflections, drawing on her experience of learning and working in various national higher education contexts. Aspects the two students highlight resonate with the ethos of entrepreneurial education. An example of entrepreneurial learning in a collaborative Sino-UK higher education venture is therefore included here, showcasing ways in which students can further grow their strengths, with bespoke entrepreneurial mentoring support.

The mentoring thread running throughout the volume is picked up in the final chapter with specific reference to contracting (a staple element of formal mentoring relationships, achieved in complex and subtle ways in informal ones), closure and co-learning. All chapter contributions focus on long-term, ongoing mentoring relationships, in which closure is temporary and is viewed as a stepping stone for subsequent learning opportunities. To facilitate continued learning in readers, the final section in the chapter invites them to pause and reflect, signposting three sources of insight and wisdom for sustainability-oriented lifelong learning and action.

This paper highlights how career capital is accrued through three ways of knowing in a women’s leadership programme (WLP) in an Australian State Police Department. A shift in focus to building capability rather than addressing gaps in participants' abilities was enhanced through the unique use of sponsors and positive psychology interventions.

A longitudinal study, which comprised 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews and focus groups, and a survey with participants eight months after the interviews, assessed the impact of enhanced skills, connections and qualifications on extant role performance.

The WLP enhanced three key components of career capital.

The authors' study extends extant knowledge in seven key ways related to WLPs: (1) reaffirms the benefits for police, (2) developing or enhancing career capital, (3) accruing women’s career capital in policing, (4) pedagogical benefits for WLPs, (5) articulating outcomes of developing career capital, (6) the uniqueness of allocating sponsors and (7) extending empirical studies demonstrating synergies within the intelligent career framework.

This study explores the opportunities for a gender-inclusive architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, focussing on the gap between architectural education and practice. This study focusses on three research questions: (1) What factors influence women architects' career retention and advancement in the AEC industry? How can practice outcomes be linked with educational approaches for gender inclusion in the AEC industry? (3) What critical factors can enable structural changes in architecture education, including AEC-related subjects and practice/career pathways towards gender equity?

This paper is based on a systematic literature review (SLR). The established timeframe for selecting papers in this study considered the last 20 years, as various seminal studies in feminism and gender inclusion in architecture emerged in the early 2000s through the definition of keywords used in two prestigious databases. The academic articles selected were filtered through a process of inclusion and exclusion, following criteria for suitability and relevance using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews (PRISMA) diagram.

This study revealed key trends in the literature review consistent with the research questions, including (1) the disproportionate struggles women face at individual, interpersonal and organisational levels and the gender-based bias from entry and progression in the AEC industry that also requires multi-level interventions; (2) traditional architecture education affects female students and educators who find networking, social capital and leadership opportunities to challenge gender-based stereotypes and promote workplace equity, and finally, (3) observe enablers for fostering equity in architecture and education, which should not be limited to policy-driven interventions but structural transformations through transparency, mentorship, leadership, awareness raising and empowerment of women and men, promoting inclusivity and gender equity in the AEC industry.

This study considers a global understanding of gender equity in the AEC industry, regional and country-specific analysis needs to be considered in future studies. The study's focus is on women’s inclusion, acknowledging the limitations of conventional binary gender concepts; future studies need to include the experiences of LGBTI + communities and other underrepresented groups. The literature review considers only academic articles; future research should also consider industry reports, government initiatives and organisational documents for a broader understanding of diversity efforts in business.

This paper observes the issues for gender-inclusive architecture within the context of a male-dominant AEC industry through linking architectural education and practice. Studies rarely focus on this link and address workplace issues. This study highlights this link and extends the discussion through the critical literature review, providing a new ground for geographic-specific or intersectional studies.