Gender, mentoring and social capital in the National Health Service (NHS) in Scotland, UK

This chapter investigates the role of gender, mentoring and social capital and contributes to literature about the career development of women in senior management roles in the National Health Service of the UK. It draws on a doctoral study of senior-level managers in a Scottish NHS Board. The data collected are: (i) documentary; (ii) quantitative; and (iii) qualitative. The quantitative data are collected through questionnaires, while the source of qualitative data is in-depth semi-structured interviews. The doctoral study is embedded within an interpretivist and feminist paradigm. Although access to mentoring and social capital was seen as likely to enhance the career progression of females to senior managerial roles, gendered work and family expectations, gendered organisational culture, and normative performances of gendered senior management were identified as obstacles in taking advantages of mentoring and social capital. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only piece of work that explicitly investigates the role of mentoring and social capital in managing gender diversity at the senior managerial positions of the NHS

Hybridity, identities and inclusion of international PhD students in England

This paper draws on a qualitative interview study, which aimed to explore how international PhD students make sense of their experiences of studying in a Russell group University and living in England. Hybridity was narrated as contextual and relational identity performance in response to encounters with difference and was imbued with emotions of loss, confusion, tension and disappointment. Hybridity encompassed a range of identity positions including shifting old identities, blending local and global identities, and re-defining old identities. These positions intersected with students’ constructions and performances of gender, religion, culture, nationality and community and were shaped by international PhD students’ attempts to interact with home students, staff and the wider community, and feel included. Although international students’ attempts to create social capital and negotiate hybrid identities took place within unequal relations of power, they demonstrated intentionality, agency and diversity. Further research is required to critique the homogenisation of international students and unravel multiple inequalities in higher education, which continue to constrain the participation of many groups of students despite popular discourses of internationalization and widening participation.University of Yor

Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled and Intersectional Politics Interrogated

Feminist sisterhood has been heavily criticized by Black feminists and others as installing a false sense of equality among women and being overly ambitious in disrupting the models and boundaries of the neo-liberal university. This paper draws on the autobiographical account of a White-other, female European migrant academic in the United Kingdom to consider how intersectional disadvantage and privilege shapes feminist sisterhood with profound implications for academic identities, careers, and belonging in the internationalized university and the wider socio-political British context. I draw on my professional trajectory to demonstrate how othering and violence in the form of verbal abuse, microaggressions, misrecognitions, and xenophobic and racist performances of professional authority and superiority operate as dividing mechanisms among feminists within the context of institutional inequalities, color and class prejudice, and global hierarchies of North/South and East/West. I argue that the conditionality of Whiteness, coupled with the gendering, racialization, ethnicization and citizenship rights of European minorities within the pre/post Brexit context affect female migrant academics’ sense of legitimacy, belonging, and solidarity. Moreover, unraveling hegemonic feminist subjectivities and the boundaries that are erected against female migrants can expose the racialized aggression and lack of feminist solidarity in neo-liberal British academia

The nature of medical evidence and its inherent uncertainty for the clinical consultation : qualitative study

Objective To describe how clinicians deal with the uncertainty inherent in medical evidence in clinical consultations. Design Qualitative study. Setting Clinical consultations related to hormone replacement therapy, bone densitometry, and breast screening in seven general practices and three secondary care clinics in the UK NHS. Participants Women aged 45-64. Results 45 of the 109 relevant consultations included sufficient discussion for analysis. The consultations could be categorised into three groups: focus on certainty for now and this test, with slippage into general reassurance; a coherent account of the medical evidence for risks and benefits, but blurring of the uncertainty inherent in the evidence and giving an impression of certainty; and acknowledging the inherent uncertainty of the medical evidence and negotiating a provisional decision. Conclusion Strategies health professionals use to cope with the uncertainty inherent in medical evidence in clinical consultations include the use of provisional decisions that allow for changing priorities and circumstances over time, to avoid slippage into general reassurance from a particular test result, and to avoid the creation of a myth of certainty

Family health narratives : midlife women’s concepts of vulnerability to illness

Perceptions of vulnerability to illness are strongly influenced by the salience given to personal experience of illness in the family. This article proposes that this salience is created through autobiographical narrative, both as individual life story and collectively shaped family history. The paper focuses on responses related to health in the family drawn from semi-structured interviews with women in a qualitative study exploring midlife women’s health. Uncertainty about the future was a major emergent theme. Most respondents were worried about a specified condition such as heart disease or breast cancer. Many women were uncertain about whether illness in the family was inherited. Some felt certain that illness in the family meant that they were more vulnerable to illness or that their relatives’ ageing would be mirrored in their own inevitable decline, while a few expressed cautious optimism about the future. In order to elucidate these responses, we focused on narratives in which family members’ appearance was discussed and compared to that of others in the family. The visualisation of both kinship and the effects of illness, led to strong similarities being seen as grounds for worry. This led to some women distancing themselves from the legacies of illness in their families. Women tended to look at the whole family as the context for their perceptions of vulnerability, developing complex patterns of resemblance or difference within their families

Editorial

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Consultant medical trainers, modernising medical careers (MMC) and the European time directive (EWTD): tensions and challenges in a changing medical education context

Background: We analysed the learning and professional development narratives of Hospital Consultants training junior staff ('Consultant Trainers') in order to identify impediments to successful postgraduate medical training in the UK, in the context of Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) and the European Working Time Directive (EWTD). Methods: Qualitative study. Learning and continuing professional development (CPD), were discussed in the context of Consultant Trainers' personal biographies, organisational culture and medical education practices. We conducted life story interviews with 20 Hospital Consultants in six NHS Trusts in Wales in 2005. Results: Consultant Trainers felt that new working patterns resulting from the EWTD and MMC have changed the nature of medical education. Loss of continuity of care, reduced clinical exposure of medical trainees and loss of the popular apprenticeship model were seen as detrimental for the quality of medical training and patient care. Consultant Trainers' perceptions of medical education were embedded in a traditional medical education culture, which expected long hours' availability, personal sacrifices and learning without formal educational support and supervision. Over-reliance on apprenticeship in combination with lack of organisational support for Consultant Trainers' new responsibilities, resulting from the introduction of MMC, and lack of interest in pursuing training in teaching, supervision and assessment represent potentially significant barriers to progress. Conclusion: This study identifies issues with significant implications for the implementation of MMC within the context of EWTD. Postgraduate Deaneries, NHS Trusts and the new body; NHS: Medical Education England should deal with the deficiencies of MMC and challenges of ETWD and aspire to excellence. Further research is needed to investigate the views and educational practices of Consultant Medical Trainers and medical trainees

Gendered and classed performances of motherhood and good academic in Greece

The enduring significance of gender and how it intersects with class in the organisation of parenting, domestic, and professional work has been obscured in contemporary neo-liberal contexts. This paper examines how Greek academic women conceptualize and enact motherhood and the classed and gendered strategies they adopt to reconcile ‘good’ motherhood with notions of the ‘good’ academic professional. It draws on semi-structured interviews about the career narratives of 15 women in Greek Medical Schools at the aftermath of the Greek recession. The analysis presented in this paper is informed by a feminist post-structuralist paradigm and an emic approach to intersectionality. Motherhood emerged in the data as a dynamic concept, and a network of practices both constrained and enabled by gendered and classed family and work cultures. Drawing on neo-liberal ‘DIY’ and ‘having it all’ discourse Greek mothers claimed that they could achieve almost anything professionally, if they organised their private lives sensibly. They drew on idealised discourses of motherhood, but they also contradicted these notions by doing non- traditional forms of motherhood, such as remote or transnational motherhood, afforded by their privileged social positioning and academic careers. Further research is required to investigate configurations of classed motherhood in less prestigious professions

Gender and teacher-student classroom interaction : An ethnographic study in a secondary school in Greece

This study explores classroom teacher-student interaction in a secondary, urban, working-class school in Greece and throws light on the connections between teachers' behaviour and their ideas about gender.It is a qualitative ethnographic study. For the collection of data the following methods were used: oral history interviews, classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and documents. Five teachers participated in this study, four female and only one male. They taught different subjects: modern Greek, physics religious education, English and mathematics. They were all observed teaching one group (B3) which consisted of eleven students, eleven female and eleven male.Although the sample was small and there were many variations, the findings of this study suggest that overall teachers behaved differently towards girls and boys. Teachers' general lack of awareness or low level of awareness of gender as an organising and categorising factor in students' behaviour and generally in schooling as well as the teachers' tacit assumptions about gender influenced the way that teachers related to girls and boys in the classroom.Other issues such as a lack of teachers' training on equal opportunities, the low status of the school, and the principal's lack of involvement in the promotion of gender equality in the school might have had an impact on teacher-student interaction.Further research on these issues and on a wider scale is advocated.</p