The role women play in sustainable agriculture and rural development in Northern Ireland.

Reference: ECA: WPW/02/CASE NORTHERN IRELAND W/X0000/e

Collaboration in academic medicine:Reflections on gender and advancement

Purpose: Collaboration in academic medicine is encouraged, yet no one has studied the environment in which faculty collaborate. The authors investigated how faculty experienced collaboration and the institutional atmosphere for collaboration. Method: In 2007, as part of a qualitative study of faculty in five disparate U.S. medical schools, the authors interviewed 96 medical faculty at different career stages and in diverse specialties, with an oversampling of women, minorities, and generalists, regarding their perceptions and experiences of collaboration in academic medicine. Data analysis was inductive and driven by the grounded theory tradition. Results: Female faculty expressed enthusiasm about the potential and process of collaboration; male faculty were more likely to focus on outcomes. Senior faculty experienced a more collaborative environment than early career faculty, who faced numerous barriers to collaboration: the hierarchy of medical academe, advancement criteria, and the lack of infrastructure supportive of collaboration. Research faculty appreciated shared ideas, knowledge, resources, and the increased productivity that could result from collaboration, but they were acutely aware that advancement requires an independent body of work, which was a major deterrent to collaboration among early career faculty. Conclusions: Academic medicine faculty have differing views on the impact and benefits of collaboration. Early career faculty face concerning obstacles to collaboration. Female faculty seemed more appreciative of the process of collaboration, which may be of importance for transitioning to a more collaborative academic environment. A reevaluation of effective benchmarks for promotion of faculty is warranted to address the often exclusive reliance on individualistic achievement. © 2009 The Association of American Medical Colleges.

Employment patterns in contemporary retailing:gender and work in five supermarkets

This article examines trends in patterns of employment within contemporary retailing. It focuses upon five supermarkets in the Lancaster area. In each store the proportion of part-timers had increased during the 1980s. There were marked differences in the proportions of female full-time and part-time employees who were married. Management reported similar perceptions of the relative advantages and disadvantages of employing married women within their stores. These belief systems coexisted with radically divergent recruitment strategies by these managements. These variations were embedded witnin typical recruitment strategies in each of the firms examined. -from Authors

Gender and Politics in Northern Ireland: the representation gap revisited

This article examines the nature of gender politics in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Taking gender justice as a normative democratic framework, the article argues that despite the promise of women's equal participation in public and political life written into the Agreement, parties have delivered varied responses to integrating women, women's interests and perspectives into politics and policy platforms. This contrasts with general patterns supporting women's increased participation in social and political life. The article discusses women's descriptive and substantive representation through electoral outcomes and party manifestos, using the demands of successive women's manifestos as a benchmark. It concludes that while parties have given less recognition and inclusion to women than one might have expected in a new political context, the push for democratic accountability will ensure that gender politics will continue to have a place on the political agenda for some time to come.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a Tool for Concept Clarification, Typology Building, and Contextualized Comparisons in Gender and Feminist Research

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for the systematic analysis of cases. A holistic view of cases and an approach to causality emphasizing complexity are some of its core features. Over the last decades, QCA has found application in many fields of the social sciences. In spite of this, its use in feminist research has been slower, and only recently QCA has been applied to topics related to social care, the political representation of women, and reproductive politics. In spite of the comparative turn in feminist studies, researchers still privilege qualitative methods, in particular case studies, and are often skeptical of quantitative techniques (Spierings 2012). These studies show that the meaning and measurement of many gender concepts differ across countries and that the factors leading to feminist success and failure are context specific. However, case study analyses struggle to systematically account for the ways in which these forces operate in different locations.

Women in Ulster, 1600-1800

Some have entertained the belief that early modern Gaelic society conferred substantial rights on women. This could hardly be farther from the truth. In aristocratic Gaelic circles women were used ruthlessly as pawns in political alliances and other manoeuvres. The status of women at the lower levels of society also seems to have been low relative to men. While patriarchal relationships persisted after the Plantation of Ulster, they took new forms. Some women actually benefited in terms of property rights relative to men. Economic change in the eighteenth century, in particular the development of proto-industry, opened up opportunities for poorer women but it is notable that women did not feature at all in the public political sphere before 1800

Reading the Irishwoman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714-1960

In 1700 few Irishwomen were literate. Most lived in a rural environment, rarely encountered a book or a play or ventured much beyond their own domestic space. By 1960 literacy was universal, all Irishwomen attended primary school, had access to a variety of books, magazines, newspapers and other forms of popular media and the wider world was now part of their every-day life. This study seeks to examine the cultural encounters and exchanges inherent in this transformation. It analyses reading and popular and consumer culture as sites of negotiation of gender roles. This is not an exhaustive treatment of the theme but focusses on three key points of cultural encounter: the Enlightenment, emigration and modernism. The writings and intellectual discourse generated by the Enlightenment was one of the most influential forces shaping western society. It set the agenda for scientific, political and social thought for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The migration of peoples to north America was another key historical marker in the development of the modern world. Emigration altered and shaped American society as well as the lives of those who remained behind. By the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism suspicious of enlightenment rationalism and determined to produce new cultural forms developed in a complex relationship with the forces of industrialisation, urbanisation and social change. This study analyses the impact of these three key forces in Western culture on changing roles and perceptions of Irish women from 1700 to 1960.

GENDER AND CLASS MOBILITY - EVIDENCE FROM THE REPUBLIC-OF-IRELAND

Gender has frequently been identified as the most controversial issue confronting class analysis. In this paper we make use of data from the Republic of Ireland to assess the extent to which the incorporation of women in class mobility analysis alters our understanding of the central processes of social mobility. We find that for married women their husband's class is a more powerful predictor of household poverty and life-style than their own 'class' as indicated by current or previous occupation. With regard to employment mobility we find that the sole source of gender variation in mobility chances relates to differences in the objective opportunity structures faced by men and women. Applying a measured variable model to 'men only' and 'complete' mobility tables reveals only modest differences in the patterns of social fluidity. The inclusion of women in class mobility tables requires little in the way of substantial modification of our understanding of the pattern of class relationships underlying the observed pattern of mobility.