Effect of attitudes towards creating women managers in the construction industry

The paper attempts to explore the issues associated with peoples’ attitudes towards under-representation of women at senior managerial positions in the construction industry through a literature review. The construction industry holds an image of a rough natured industry associated with difficult working conditions. The attitudes and stereotypes of society regarding managing work and resources in that hard environment - by a woman, normally expected to be the heart of the family scene, with social responsibilities and in the traditional motherly role - are preventing the promotion of women managers in the industry. Since attitudes are the people's biases or tendencies that influence their response to situations, activities or the people, changing attitudes can be used as a powerful device for altering the pattern of thinking and human behaviour. The construction industry will benefit with more women managers if the unfavourable attitudes regarding the promotion of women managers can be changed

“What on earth are they doing in a racing car?”: Towards an Understanding of Women in Motorsport.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupMotorsport is an under-researched area of socio-historical study. There is particularly limited academic understanding of female involvement in the social world of motorsports. Therefore, this paper focuses on the role of the media in presenting and establishing motorsport for women. In particular, a documentary analysis of articles published by a UK national newspaper group from 1890, and a case study of an all-female UK-based motor-racing championship are used to account for gendered processes that have influenced attitudes and behaviours towards women motor racers. The motor car emerged through technological progress in an overtly masculine-dominated industrial period. Traditional assumptions and biologically deterministic attitudes towards women were used by men to position motoring and motor-racing as a male preserve. Newspaper reporting throughout the 1930s suggests an era of heightened success for women motor racers as a result of gaining access to a key resource in the form of Brooklands motor-racing circuit. Following the Second World War, there was increasing commercialization and professionalization of male-dominated motorsport, as well as renewed marginalization and trivialization of female participants within the newspapers. These processes continue to influence perceptions of women in contemporary motorsport.Peer reviewe

The glass ceiling : is it a state of mind?

Much is written in the literature and press about women having to break through the glass ceiling, but is there indeed any truth in this theory? For some women, working their way up the promotion ladder can be a challenge, but is it really as difficult as it is perceived? It would be naïve to think that all women are as ambitious as to want to break through the glass ceiling, and indeed in certain categories of employment such as advertising and marketing, they do appear to have made their mark, but science, engineering and technology, do not seem to attract females in the same numbers. We would argue that this lack of advancement is not necessarily due to a lack of opportunity. This paper addresses the role of women in science, engineering, and technology, assessing the support mechanisms offered to them to succeed in their chosen occupations. The investigation identifies factors that have led to women achieving senior levels in higher education, business, and government in the UK, thus making it through the glass ceiling. The methodology undertaken in this study includes, desk-based research, analysis of surveys, observations from literature search and surveys, and interviews/case studies of a number of prominent and internationally successful women; and final conclusions. All comprise the three components of the Triple Helix - influence of government through legislation, uptake in academia, and attendant support mechanisms, and impact in industry

Tri Rismaharini's Androgynous Leadership: Strategizing “Hegemonic Masculinity”i

This paper analyses the leadership style of Tri Rismaharini, the Mayor of Surabaya City (2010-2020) using feminist research methodology by centralizing on women‟s personal experiences in a specific context to gain knowledge based on their real life experiences. It employed a qualitative approach by using various videos and written materials of Risma‟s attitudes and experiences as a female political leader. The findings discover that unlike the common feminine leadership style of Indonesian female political leaders, Risma‟s shows a masculine leadership style. It can be seen from her assertive approaches while closing down Gang Dolly located in Surabaya as the biggest red-light district in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, Risma‟s masculinity is combined with motherly value which results in an androgynous leadership style. This paper shows that rather than merely accepting the western notion which believes that the more a woman shows masculinity, the more she hits the ground running for exercising power in the male-dominated political atmosphere. This paper would like to show that Javanese society‟s acceptance of Risma‟s leadership style indicates their approval for female leadership and wider tolerance towards new value of masculinity performed by a female leader despite inconsistency with the gender normative standard of feminine Javanese women. This paper concludes by emphasizing that Risma‟s masculine leadership traits can be seen as strategizing a move towards hijacking “hegemonic masculinity”

Patent Law, Copyright Law, and the Girl Germs Effect

[Excerpt] Inventors pursue patents and authors receive copyrights. No special education is required for either endeavor, and nothing precludes a person from being both an author and an inventor. Inventors working on patentable industrial projects geared toward commercial exploitation tend to be scientists or engineers. Authors, with the exception of those writing computer code, tend to be educated or trained in the creative arts, such as visual art, performance art, music, dance, acting, creative writing, film making, and architectural drawing. There is a well-warranted societal supposition that most of the inventors of patentable inventions are male. Assumptions about the genders of the authors of remunerative commercially exploited copyrights may be less rigid. Women authors are more broadly visible than women inventors across most of the typical categories of copyrightable works. Yet, whether one considers patentable inventions or copyrightable works, the vast majority of the very profitable ones are both originated and controlled by men. This causes a host of negative consequences for women. They start and run businesses at much lower rates than men and rarely reach elite leadership levels in the corporate world or within high-profile artistic or cultural communities. They are perceived as less competent, less dedicated, and less hard working, and suffer from a lack of female mentors and female colleagues. Women are lied to during financial negotiations more than men and earn less than men in equivalent positions. Women control only a tiny portion of the world’s wealth. Though female students outperform male students in almost every context and at almost every level of education, and even seek postdegree job-related training in greater numbers than men, this has not helped women to produce and control patentable inventions or to author and own valuable copyrighted works in numbers comparable to men

The women in IT (WINIT) final report

The Women in IT (WINIT) project was funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) from March 2004 until April 2006 under HE ESF Objective 3: Research into equal opportunities in the labour market. Specifically the project came under Policy Field 2, Measure 2: Gender discrimination in employment. The project was run in the Information Systems Institute of the University of Salford. One of the Research Associates has an information systems (IS) background, the other has a background in sociology. We begin this report with an overview of the current situation with regards women in the UK IT sector. Whilst gender is only recently being recognised as an issue within the mainstream IS academic community, thirty years of female under-representation in the ICT field in more general terms has received more attention from academics, industry and government agencies alike. Numerous research projects and centres (such as the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology) exist to tackle the under-representation of women in SET careers, although the figures for women’s participation in the ICT sector remain disheartening, with current estimates standing at around 15% (EOC 2004). Various innovative initiatives, such as e-Skills’ Computer Clubs for Girls, appear to have had little impact on these low female participation rates. Additionally, these and other initiatives have been interpreted as a means to fill the skills gap and ‘make up the numbers’ to boost the UK economy (French and Richardson 2005), resulting in ‘add more women and stir’ solutions to the ‘problem’ of gender in relation to inclusion in IS and ICT (Henwood 1996). Given that there have been decades of equal opportunity and related policies as well as many government initiatives designed to address the gender imbalance in IT employment patterns, sex segregation in IT occupations and pay and progression disparity in the IT sector (including the latest initiative- a one million pound DTI funded gender and SET project), we could be forgiven for assuming that these initiatives have had a beneficial effect on the position and number of women in the IT workforce, and that even if we have not yet achieved gender equity, we can surely argue that there are positive moves in the right direction. Although we do not wish to make definitive claims about the success or failure of specific initiatives, our research, backed up by recent major surveys, paints a picture that remains far from rosy. Indeed a recent comparative survey of the IT workforce in Germany, Holland and the UK indicates that women are haemorrhaging out of the UK IT workforce (Platman and Taylor 2004). From a high point of 100,892 women in the UK IT workforce in 1999, Platman and Taylor (ibid., 8) report a drop to 53,759 by 2003. As the IT industry was moving into recession anyway, the number of men in the industry has also declined, but by nothing like as much, so the figures for women are stark. When it comes to number crunching who is employed in the UK IT sector and when trying to make historical comparisons, the first obstacle is defining the sector itself. Studies vary quite substantially in the number of IT workers quoted suggesting there is quite a bit of variation in what is taken to be an IT job. The IT industry has experienced considerable expansion over the past twenty years. In spring 2003 in Britain, it was estimated that almost 900,000 people worked in ICT firms, and there were over 1 million ICT workers, filling ICT roles in any sector (e-Skills UK, 2003). This growth has resulted in talk of a ‘skills shortage’ requiring the ‘maximization’ of the workforce to its full potential: ‘You don’t just need pale, male, stale guys in the boardroom but a diversity of views’ (Stone 2004). In spring 2003 the Equal Opportunities Commission estimated there to be 151,000 women working in ICT occupations compared with 834,000 men (clearly using a different, much wider job definition from that of Platman and Taylor (2004)) , whilst in the childcare sector, there were less than 10,000 men working in these occupations, compared with 297,000 women (EOC 2004). It is estimated that the overall proportion of women working in ICT occupations is 15% (EOC 2004). In the UK, Office of National Statistics (ONS) statistics indicate that women accounted for 30% of IT operations technicians, but a mere 15% of ICT Managers and only 11% of IT strategy and planning professionals (EOC 2004). Although women are making inroads into technical and senior professions there remains a ‘feminisation’ of lower level jobs, with a female majority in operator and clerical roles and a female minority in technical and managerial roles (APC 2004).

Dundee’s Jute mills and factories: Spaces of production, surveillance and discipline

Taking Dundee’s jute industry as its focus, this paper provides a geographical reading of the architectural form, design and layout of the mills and factories of the late nineteenth century. By tracking the change from the multi-storey to the shed system, it emphasises the importance of the internal geographies of the production process. And drawing upon Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, notably his rule of functional sites and techniques of enclosure and partitioning, together with his tentative references to the factory system, I show how the external architecture and internal space of the mills and factories were used to create an ordered geography of both people and machinery and help maintain a gendered labour hierarchy. With the industry’s largely female workforce channelled through points of visibility, a preliminary investigation is made into the matrix of knowledge, spanning the entire works, that ensured all space and all those within it, could be accounted for

Chinese and Japanese: The Changing Values of "Flexible Capital"

Our project hinged on the ability of the undergraduate advanced Chinese and Japanese students at the UIUC to describe, during short interviews, the value of their respective languages in economic terms. We found that the undergraduate students involved in learning third-year Chinese and Japanese were very well aware of the changing economic reasons for learning their languages. Our hypothesis that Japanese students were more motivated by popular Japanese media while the Chinese students were more motivated by economic reasons was borne out by our findings, though to say that our hypothesis was perfect would be a gross generalization not cognizant of the outlying data and the limitations of our project.unpublishe

Exploring the Masculine Domain of Professional Football: Perceptions of Credibility of Female Coaches in the NFL

Previous research shows that females are underrepresented in the masculine domain of sport. More specifically, the hyper-masculine domain of professional football has presented women with much resistance when trying to enter the industry. Hegemonic masculinity has some responsibility for maintaining this resistance. The current study uses the lens of hegemonic masculinity to explore the space of professional football and its progression toward equality for females. Despite the first full-time female coach being hired by the Buffalo Bills in 2016, very little research exists on the topic. This study aims to add to the existing conversation on hegemonic masculinity and females in sport in order for readers to understand perceptions of credibility of females in the arena of professional football. The researcher conducted an online survey to measure credibility perceptions, gathering responses from a total of 148 participants. Spearman correlation tests as well as ANOVA and ANCOVA procedures revealed that while gender of a coach does predict credibility, gender of respondent, political ideology of respondent, or level of competitive sport played by respondent is not significant in predicting credibility. The study offers limitations as well as directions for future research