Search results

This chapter outlines the successful development of a women’s initiative from a grass roots organization to a firmly established institution within our medical school. Championed by a group of dedicated women leaders, the mission of the Alliance for Women in Medicine and Science (AWIMS) is to provide a supportive forum to promote honest discussion and positive change in the realms of gender equity, career advancement, work-life balance, and community service, and to champion professional development and promotion of women in medicine and science. What started as an informal gathering within Southern Illinois University (SIU) School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine in 2015, led by Dr Vidhya Prakash, first morphed into a robust, vital organization called Women in Medicine that contributed meaningfully to SIU Medicine and to the community before it broadened its focus to women in medicine and science and expanded its reach to the entire SIU system. In January of 2018, the initiative was firmly institutionalized as AWIMS, an organization open to ALL members of the SIU community. AWIMS seeks to advance women’s rights through various initiatives. This chapter is co-authored by AWIMS director Dr Vidhya Prakash, and Dr Anne Scheer, a qualitative sociologist in the medical school’s Department of Population Science and Policy, who hopes to help tell the story of AWIMS and translate the Alliance’s successful development process into a narrative accessible to other professionals interested in creating innovations to promote women’s interests in traditionally male-dominated professional settings.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Café on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the café, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Café temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.

A lot is known about systemic barriers to broadening participation (BP) in STEM. Empirical research has demonstrated the existence and impact of implicit bias, stereotype threat, and micro-aggressions on a sense of belonging, organizational productivity and leadership opportunities. We also know that achieving greater participation of women and faculty of color in the STEM disciplines is complicated and depends on altering complex and multi-layered interactions between activities and actors. Further, because researcher and institutional goals vary as a function of target population and context, generalizable models can struggle in the face of larger BP efforts. Through the authors experience as an NSF ADVANCE-IT awardee, the authors believe that a dynamic, multi-scaled and organizational level approach is required to reflect the reciprocal dialogue among research questions, best practices, tailored applications and quantifiable goals. The authors describe several examples of research, programming activities and program evaluation that illustrate this approach. In particular, the authors describe both the programming successes and challenges, with the aim of helping others to avoid common mistakes by articulating very broad and, the authors’ hope, generalizable “lessons learned.” The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To better understand the barriers for women in STEM, the authors utilized an iterative methodology. Specifically, the authors conducted a social network analysis, an exit survey of departed faculty, longitudinal analysis of career trajectories and research productivity, and a survey on the interaction between values and climate.

The analyses suggest three strategies better retain women in STEM: improve women’s professional networks; re-aling policy documents and departmental practices to better reflect faculty values; and improve departmental climate.

The pay-off for using this more complex research approach to triangulate onto specific challenges is that the interventions are more likely to be successful, with a longer-lasting impact.

With continuous institutional research, metric refinement, and program evaluation the authors are better able to develop targeted programming, policy reform, and changes in institutional practice. The interventions should result in permanent institutional and systemic change by integrating multi-method qualitative and quantitative research into BP practices, which the authors couple with longitudinal analysis that can quantify success of the authors’ efforts.

Female entrepreneurs often face significant conflicts in allocating time and resources to the various roles demanded of them by their communities. This has been identified as a potential obstacle to their performance as entrepreneurs. This paper aims to examine the question: How do women cope with role conflict?

The authors tackled the question by conducting a survey that involved 307 female business owners in Ethiopia. The survey result was supported by 20 in-depth interviews.

The commonest coping strategies identified were negotiation, committing to the entrepreneurial role, committing to social roles, pleasing all, seeking social support and hiring outside support. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that these coping strategies differed across the various stages of business growth. Meanwhile, structural equation modeling established that female business owners with high levels of personal resources (such as optimism, self-efficacy and resilience) committed more to their entrepreneurial roles than to their social roles.

This research contributes knowledge on coping strategies among female entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa, where family structure and orientation, the economy and social development differ from those in developed countries. The research also integrates the lines of empirical research on coping strategies with the process-based view of entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of empirical evidence on the labour market effects of health insurance from the supply side.

The study covers the largest peer-reviewed and working paper databases for labour economics and health studies. These include Web of Science, Google Scholar, Pubmed and the most popular economics working paper sources such as NBER, ECONSTOR, IDEAS, IZA, SSRN, World Bank Working Paper Series. The authors follow the PRISMA 2009 protocol for systematic reviews.

The collection includes 63 studies. The outcomes of interest are the number of hours worked, the probability of employment, self-employment and the level of economic formalisation. The authors find that the current literature is vastly concentrated on the USA. Spousal coverage in the USA is associated with reduced labour supply of secondary earners. The effect of Medicaid in the USA on the labour supply of its recipients is ambiguous. The employment-coverage link is an important determinant of the labour supply of people with health problems and self-employment decisions. Universal coverage may create either an incentive or a disincentive to work depending on the design of the system. Finally, evidence on the relationship between health insurance and the level of economic formalisation in developing countries is fragmented and limited.

This study reviews the existing literature on the labour market effects of health insurance from the supply side. The authors find a large knowledge gap in emerging economies where health coverage is expanding. The authors also highlight important literature gaps that need to be filled in different themes of the topic.

This is the first systematic review on the topic which is becoming increasingly relevant for policy makers in developing countries where health coverage is expanding.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the extent and content of the sustainability disclosure of public and foundation (private but not-for-profit) universities in Turkey.

Subsequent to a systematic literature review of six academic databases and the National Thesis Center, a content analysis using a combination of Global Reporting Initiative and campus assessment tools from previous studies is conducted on stand-alone sustainability reports and websites of a purposive sample of eight universities in Turkey.

Infrequent and unsystematic sustainability practice done through websites seems to be more prevalent than formal reporting through international initiatives. Research and practice diverge by focusing on different sustainability indicators. Sustainability needs to be integrated into teaching and curriculum through university policies and regulations. Foundation universities show greater effort in sustainability reporting than public universities.

The research is limited by the availability of mostly self-reported, dispersed and unaudited data by foundation universities in addition to framework-imposed specificities. Furthermore, there is only one public university with a formal sustainability report in the sample.

The findings offer suggestions for developing extra sustainability indicators and may assist local policy-makers and researchers in their efforts to improve sustainability reporting by local universities.

This comprehensive research effort is one of the few studies from a non-Western country perspective and the only study on Turkey in relation to universities and sustainability reporting.

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a new leadership development course for academic medical faculty.

In October 2006, a survey was electronically sent to the 55 faculty attending the Leadership Course for Junior Faculty.

A total of 29 women and 26 men attended a course; 85.5 percent responded to the survey. The course was reported to be beneficial personally and professionally to 88.0 percent and 84.0 percent of women, motivated 47.8 percent of women to seek a leadership position, and helped to secure a leadership position for 30.4 percent. This was comparable with the survey responses of men. Women were significantly more likely than men to seek academic career advancement (83.3 percent versus 55.0 percent, p=0.04) as a result of attending the course. However, women were significantly less likely to have secured a new leadership position since attending the course in comparison with men (4.2 percent versus 18.2 percent, p=0.04). This course also motivated 24.0 percent of women compared with 9.1 percent of men to take additional leadership courses (p‐value not significant). All of the women and 25/26 of the men faculty (46/47, 97.9 percent) reported that they would recommend the leadership course to junior faculty.

Formal training in leadership skills early in an academic career is professionally and personally beneficial to faculty. In particular, leadership courses can successfully motivate and encourage junior women faculty to seek leadership roles in academic medicine by providing them with the knowledge of opportunities in leadership and the skills required for such positions.

The paper presents a subjective assessment of a new leadership course.

Employee well‐being (WB) is a strategic reference of prime importance due to its impact on human capital, employee health and quality in working life, factors that are key to achieving successful organisations. The purpose of the current study is to assess the WB of female managers in the European workplace. The research analyses three dimensions (job satisfaction, comfort and enthusiasm) and the effect of job‐related factors on each one of these.

The Mental Health and Vitamin models (Warr, 1987) were taken as the starting‐point of the research. An alternative econometric method – an artificial neural network known as extreme learning machine was applied to a sample of 99 female managers collected from the 5th European Working Conditions Survey‐2010

The results obtained confirm that this methodology is valid to efficiently classify European female managers into those who feel satisfied with their jobs, calm and relaxed, and cheerful and in good spirits, and those who do not. Furthermore, the resulting model identifies the strongest factors important in determining the varied dimensions of occupational WB achieved.

Even today, despite the important contribution women managers make to the management of organisations, they have to face many challenges and overcome serious barriers in achieving and staying in positions of leaderships when compared to their male counterparts.

El bienestar laboral constituye un referente estratégico de primer orden por su impacto sobre el capital humano – salud y calidad de vida laboral de los empleados –, en aras de alcanzar organizaciones exitosas. El objetivo del presente artículo es analizar el bienestar laboral a partir de sus tres dimensiones (satisfacción, confort y entusiasmo) de las mujeres que ocupan puestos de dirección en Europa y el efecto de ciertos factores laborales.

Se adopta como punto de partida los modelos teóricos de salud mental y vitamínico (Warr, 1987), aplicando un método econométrico novedoso – redes neuronales artificiales –, a una muestra de 99 mujeres directivas extraída de la V Encuesta Europea de Condiciones de Trabajo (2010).

Los resultados obtenidos confirman la validez de esta novedosa metodología para clasificar eficazmente a las mujeres directivas que presentan un elevado grado de bienestar laboral. Por otra parte, con el modelo resultante se identifican los factores más determinantes para el logro de cada una de las dimensiones que constituyen el bienestar laboral.

Las mujeres directivas, quienes a pesar de lo mucho que tienen que aportar en la gestión de las organizaciones, aún hoy encuentran que su acceso y permanencia en los puestos de dirección está colmado de desafíos y barreras difíciles de superar en comparación con sus homólogos masculinos.