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Emma Senior
5th March 2026

International Women's Day 2026: celebrating the work of our faculty

Posted in: Equality, Research, Research4Good, Women

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To mark International Women's Day on Sunday 8 March 2026, we're delighted to be hosting a poster display in 10 East showcasing the work being carried out by some of our female researchers on gender-related issues. Explore the posters below:

Silencing women workers in global supply chains: an empirical exploration of denial, intimidation, gaslighting, performativity, and corporate human rights abuses Dr Annie Snelson-Powell This book chapter explains the forms by which women, who are at higher risk of human rights abuses within business operations, find their claims of abuse silenced. Using a database of violations against women, we explore how silencing functions across different structural levels, stemming from societal norms as well as business behaviours that impact women in the workplace. We take an exploratory approach, with a focus on violations in developing countries and learn, through these cases, more about how silencing emerges and is maintained in these settings. We also find evidence that reliance on global firms to themselves evaluate and audit human rights impacts may be prone to misuse. Our analysis shows how protections designed to support human rights in the workplace can actually prevent human rights victims from being heard.

Navigating the Labour Market: Women Job Seekers’ Mobilisation of a Postfeminist Sensibility Dr Deborah Brewis Job seeking is a crucial yet overlooked process through which people navigate the world of work. Yet there remains limited qualitative research examining the complex and nuanced experiences of job seekers in a contemporary labour market. This research explores 38 interviews with job-seeking women in England, all of whom were interviewed over a six-month period. Findings reveal an oscillation between experiencing empowerment and success on the one hand, and disempowerment and perceived failure on the other. These include wanting to: find the “right” job, but accept any job; convey an authentic self but imitate what they think employers want; negotiate salaries, but accept pay cuts; and emulate “successful” behaviours, but experience doubt, uncertainty and negativity.

Examining Membership Across Multiple Online Communities in the ‘Manosphere’ Dessi Bocheva, Dr Joanne Hinds, Dr Olivia Brown Online communities are vast, complex spaces attracting diverse users, offering connection but also spreading harmful content, including misogyny and extremism. We examined engagement across multiple communities using over 4 million Reddit posts from 20 “subreddits” in the “manosphere”— an ecosystem of anti-feminist online communities. We find that users’ membership in the “manosphere” constitutes engagement with an array of communities; develop a measure of relative engagement to show that users post unequally across their member communities; and we explore the patterns of engagement across communities. We also highlight the value of studying online community membership from a more holistic perspective for researchers, designers and content moderators.

(A)symmetries in beauty-status exchange: spousal relative income and partners’ BMI (at) during marriage Dr Joanna Syrda This research examines the “beauty-status exchange” among married couples (approximated by BMI and income). The results confirm asymmetrical, gendered exchange patterns at marriage selection – as documented in previous research. However, this research finds that during marriage, the effects are symmetrical: increase in one spouse's relative income is associated with a lower BMI and higher exercise frequency in the other. What was once widely thought of as a gendered, one-sided exchange, may have become a mutual process of balance, maintained in part through deliberate changes in fitness routines. These effects are largely symmetrical, holding true for both men and women. Marriage, it turns out, remains a dynamic marketplace of mutual adjustment.

On the dynamics of intersectional (in)visibility: Women early career researchers negotiating authenticity at work Professor Mairi Maclean How do women negotiate and express authenticity in professional contexts where their presence and identities are largely rendered (in)visible? We use semi-structured interviews to explore how women early-career researchers negotiate authenticity amid visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility at work. Our findings reveal the negotiation of authenticity is closely tied to gender performance in a manner that aligns with perceived professionalism. This entails compartmentalising values when feeling invisible, heightened awareness of boundaries when visibility increases and enacting adaptive agency when hypervisible. As such, we suggest authenticity is a process of ongoing identity construction and negotiation, rather than a static ideal.

Meritocracy and gender in management and organisations Professor Martyna Sliwa This chapter focuses on the meanings, practices and challenges connected to meritocracy in organisations – in particular on the tensions associated with the link between meritocracy and the persistent gender inequalities in organisational settings. Following a definition and a historical overview of the concept of meritocracy, the chapter discusses the existing research in management and organisation studies that addresses the intersection between meritocracy and gender. It highlights that, whilst the notion of meritocracy continues to retain positive connotations, research in fact suggests that the belief in meritocracy and the application of meritocratic principles in recruitment and promotion persistently result in the continuation of organisational inequalities. Fifty years of fighting sex discrimination: Undermining entrenched misogynies through recognition and everyday resistance Professor Nancy Harding It has been over 50 years since the passing of the UK’s Sex Discrimination Act (1975). The success of the Act is mixed: there has been progress but much more still needs to be done. In this study, we seek understanding of the mechanisms through which changes, albeit limited, have been made, with the aim of identifying strategies for continuing progress towards equalities. Using a feminist methodology of researching differently within an archive of memories, and the work of feminist psychoanalytical theorist Jessica Benjamin, we identify that women are engaged in micro-revolutions involving everyday strategies of resistance. Over time, these accumulate and bring about changes on which we can continue to build. This research contributes a theory of women’s agency as quiet revolutionaries.

Macho meals? A mixed methods study on traditional masculine norms and animal product consumption in the UK Dr Annayah Prosser While vegetarianism and veganism are becoming increasingly common globally, men still consume more meat than women and demonstrate greater resistance to meat-reduction interventions. In this paper, we explore the nuances of meat consumption among men from two mixed-methods perspectives. We found that greater alignment with traditional masculine norms was significantly associated with greater meat consumption, as well as a stronger perception that meat is masculine and a higher sense of threat from vegetarians. Our analysis also indicated that men have an often contradictory understanding of the role of their gender in food choices. While some denied that gender influenced their consumption, they would then discuss the gendered dynamics of social eating.

Posted in: Equality, Research, Research4Good, Women

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