Women Managers, Leaders and the Media Gaze: Learning from popular culture, autobiographies, broadcast and media press

YesPurpose Purpose To extend the ESRC funded UK Seminar Series, Challenging Gendered Media (Mis)Representations of Women Professionals and Leaders; highlight research into the gendered media constructions of women managers and leaders and outline effective methods and methodologies into diverse media. Design/methodology/approach Design/methodology/approach Gendered analysis of television, autobiographies (of Sheryl Sandberg, Karren Brady, Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard), broadcast news media and media press through critical discourse analysis, thematic analysis, metaphor, computer-aided text analysis software following the format of the Gender Media Monitoring Project (2015) and [critical] ecological framework for advancing social change. Findings Findings Papers surface the gendered nature of media constructions of women managers and leaders and offer methods and methodologies for others to follow to interrogate gendered media. Further the papers discuss: how women’s leadership is glamourized, fetishized, and sexualized; the embodiment of leadership for women; how popular culture can subvert the dominant gaze; how women use agency and how powerful gendered norms shape perceptions, discourses and norms and how these are resisted, repudiated and re-presented. Practical implications Practical implications The papers focus upon how the media constructs women managers and leaders and offers implications of how media influences and is influenced by practice. There are recommendations provided as to how the media could itself be organised differently to reflect diverse audiences and what can be done to challenge gendered media. Originality/value Originality/value: Invited Special Issue comprising inaugural collection of research through which we get to ‘see’ women and leaders and the gendered media gaze and to learn from research into popular culture through analysis of television, autobiographies and media press

Model-driven requirements engineering: Synchronising models in an air traffic management case study

Different modelling techniques from different disciplines are needed to model complex socio-technical systems and their requirements. This paper describes the application of RESCUE, a process that integrates 4 modelling techniques to model and analyse stakeholder requirements for DMAN, a system for scheduling and managing the departure of aircraft from major European airports. It describes how human activity, use case and i* modelling were applied and integrated using synchronisation checks to model requirements on DMAN. Synchronisation checks applied at predefined stages in RESCUE revealed omissions and potential inconsistencies in the models and stakeholder requirements that, in turn, led to improvements to the models and resulting specification. The paper ends with implications for requirements model integration, and describes future work to extend and apply RESCUE

Women entrepreneurs : jumping the corporate ship or gaining new wings.

Paper originally presented at the 30th International Conference of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, 7-9 November 2007, Glasgow,UK. Awarded Best Paper ‘Women’s Enterprise and Family Enterprise Development’ track, ISBE Conference 2007 (£500). Advances field through empirical investigation of push-pull dichotomy in career transition literature for women leaving corporate employment for entrepreneurship. Argues women’s motivations for entrepreneurship remain unsatisfied until businesses evolved and they gained personal and professional development

Regulatory T cell-derived extracellular vesicles modify dendritic cell function

Regulatory T cells (Treg) are a subpopulation of T cells that maintain tolerance to self and limit other immune responses. They achieve this through different mechanisms including the release of extracellular vesicles (EVs) such as exosomes as shown by us, and others. One of the ways that Treg derived EVs inhibit target cells such as effector T cells is via the transfer of miRNA. Another key target for the immunoregulatory function of Tregs is the dendritic cells (DCs). In this study we demonstrate directly, and for the first time, that miRNAs are transferred from Tregs to DCs via Treg derived EVs. In particular two miRNAs, namely miR-150-5p and miR-142-3p, were increased in DCs following their interaction with Tregs and Treg derived exosomes. One of the consequences for DCs following the acquisition of miRNAs contained in Treg derived EVs was the induction of a tolerogenic phenotype in these cells, with increased IL-10 and decreased IL-6 production being observed following LPS stimulation. Altogether our findings provide data to support the idea that intercellular transfer of miRNAs via EVs may be a novel mechanism by which Tregs regulate DC function and could represent a mechanism to inhibit immune reactions in tissues

Towards an ontology of requirements engineering approaches

Requirements are a key factor in determining the success or failure of the system development process. Requirements engineering is a creative problem-solving process whose primary purpose is to enable researchers and practitioners to apply appropriate theories, models, techniques and tools to understand and support the requirements processes more effectively. However, there is a multitude of ways to conduct the requirements engineering process and the quality of the requirements can be greatly influenced by the approaches employed. While consensus exists that no one approach works in all situations, how do practitioners and researchers select the most relevant and appropriate approach(es)? In order to understand this, we argue that a community-based effort is required to organise the plethora of requirements engineering approaches into an ontology. Such a structure would provide an opportunity to identify gaps and to improve the interfaces between approaches. Crowdsourcing the development and validation of such an ontology would facilitate its application across different system types and application domains