WHEN's Blog

Welcome to the 5th issue of The Edit. In this issue we explore how gender bias has affected women in their career journeys. We have some fascinating insights from Dr Sonia Virdee, a member of the WHEN Advisory Board, as well as from contributors from China and Italy. We also have practical career tips from Perrett Laver who ran the extremely popular career surgeries at our WHEN conference.

WHEN CEO Alice Chilver is currently on maternity leave and appointed Kate Faxen as Director of Operations and Anna Bewick as Director of Development.

The WHEN team have put together a great programme of events for 2019-20 which you can read about on the WHEN website. We are also...

by Dr Sonia Virdee

Are our values truly reflected in the HE sector?

Most of us, I think, work in HE because it accords with our values. We believe in the power that creating new knowledge and educating people has in making the world a better place: through social mobility, technological developments, enriching our culture, and contributing to well-being and prosperity. We enjoy being part of an enlightened, thinking community, where discourse, analysis and debate are welcomed and where many voices can be heard. We are used to diversity - diversity of knowledge, expertise, opinion; and many universities are truly global in their reach and in their staff and student communities, and/or...

By Dr Jummy Okoya

This article is meant to equip all women in higher education with the tools and techniques to help build up their skills of resilience, including raising awareness of their well-being. Research has revealed that our well-being is always the first to suffer when we are going through challenges or adversity. My aim is to challenge you to be proactive and to know the right tool to deploy when dealing with challenges or adversity in any domain of your lives. 

I have attended many workshops where the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and ambiguity) environment is considered new normal, but I beg to differ because I believe that VUCA has always been a constant in the...

In conversation with … women leaders in higher education and beyond

Dr Susi Poli in conversation with Ines Fabbro, former head of administration and female role model

This article has had a long gestation and can be dated back to the kick-off of my doctoral thesis [1], which was when I began dealing with the topic of women’s careers in the higher education sector and of how their leadership skills took shape. For a number of reasons, this was expected to be a tricky topic, since it had not been covered enough before - if not locally but with no build-up to this line of research - and also because it triggers a variety of implications: from the type of society women find...

Interview with Dr Yuliana Topazly by Clare Hewitt

What led you to decide to set up your own enterprise?

Entrepreneurship has always been part of my DNA as I have been involved in supporting my family business since I was 12 years of age. When I came to the UK almost 20 years ago, I became engaged with the university sector and the whole enterprise agenda in the UK, setting up an entrepreneur society, entering business competitions. But what actually pushed me to my first enterprise was that I used to work in a larger corporation and then I had my daughter. I got refused and was pushed to leave. So I was shocked with this situation and it really damaged my self-confidence and led to...

By Sarah John and Kate Hunter, Joint Heads of the UK Higher Education Practice at executive search firm Perrett Laver

 
It is fair to say that many of us spend more time planning a holiday than our careers. But, we’re almost certain that most of us spend far more time in our workplace than we do on the beach! As executive search consultants, we spend our professional lives thinking and talking about careers, and recognise how beneficial it can be to stop and think about what you really want from your career and how you might get there. 

Here are some of our top tips: 

Take responsibility

This is your career and no one else will take as much interest...

Recalling a maiden in the Qin Dynasty like a grass leaf in a thousand-li distance 

In London,/ a multicultural city, lives a Chinese woman./ The Chinese woman enjoys her exploration in books and words here,/ like riding a horse on a boat./ In retrospect of the past decay,/ she cheers herself up with her dream of being an idiot for long,/ with joy and tears./ The tears are shed/  for both the departures from/ and encounters of the known and the unknown./

 (written on October 4th, 2017 in London)

It is pleasant to read articles in THE EDIT and to learn about what it means to be women working in the sector....