Over half a million pounds awarded to gender inequalities research project

A project which is researching gender inequalities happening on online work platforms, has just been awarded over half a million pounds.

An OU team led by Dr Lisa Lazard, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Professor Rose Capdevila, Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, has been awarded just over £545,000 by CHANSE (EU Commission/Economic and Social Research Council) for a three-year project which will gather evidence from across four countries: Gender Equitable Interactions Online (GEiO): Supporting gender equity in work-based videoconferencing.

Working in collaboration with universities and corporations in the UK, Iceland, Spain and Germany, the researchers will collect video and narrative data about participants’ experience of online digital work meetings and their understanding of acceptable working practices in these environments.

“We will use a combination of techniques to encourage people to talk about their experiences,” said Dr Lazard. “We sense that sexual harassment is happening on online work meetings and our project is wider than that; it also looks at more general gender inequities and patterns around everyday interactions.”

Early findings working with corporations in the UK suggest that organisations are unequipped to deal with inequity online.

“We are working with our stakeholders to design recommendations and policy to deal with this,” Dr Lazard added.

A key aim is to build new transnational evidence on the currently unexplored ways in which digital videoconferencing innovations can be used to perpetuate or resist gender inequity at work. The research findings will provide a firm basis for knowledge exchange with private sector organisations, to develop evidence-based training and policy that better respond to the needs of those who have experienced gendered discrimination in a digital work context. An accredited micro credential training course on gender equitable interactions online will be produced and translated into the languages used in each of the partner locations.

The OU is collaborating with University of Iceland, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Technische Hochschule Deggendorf.

• Find out more about OU research in psychology