We hosted our 3rd Accommodating Diversity in the Workplace Conference at the University of Reading, UK on Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th June 2025. This conference followed on from our successful 1st Accommodating Diversity in the Workplace Conference and 2nd Accommodating Diversity in the Workplace Conference. Thank you to everyone who participated and especially to our speakers. This interdisciplinary conference was aimed at academics, practitioners and employers interested in issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and their implications for workplace practice. You can catch up with the presentations below:
Day 1
Day 1 started with 3 presentations as part of a Menopause and Workplace special session.
Tatiana Rowson, University of Reading kicked off the session with her presentation: Menopause as a Career Disruptor? A narrative study of how menopausal women make sense of career disruptions
Katrina Forbes-McKay, Robert Gordan University then followed with her presentation: Menopause support in the Workplace, how can we break the Taboo
This special session finished with Samantha Evans, University of Kent, who followed up her talk from the 2nd Accommodating Diversity in the Workplace Conference with her presentation: Exploring the Lived Employee Experience of Menopause: Challenging the Middle-Class Bias
Session 2 of day 1 started with Devran Gulel, University of Portsmouth and Frances Hamilton, University of Reading, whose joint presentation explored: Identifying and Addressing Barriers to Conducting Feminist Research Concerning Women in Employment
Frances has presented at all three of our conferences!
Meenakshi Krishnan, Institute for Employment Studies, finished session 2 with her presentation: Rapid Evidence Assessment on what promotes employer behaviour change in relation to EDI
The final session of day 1 featured two online presentations.
Hadar Elraz, Swansea University, started the session with her presentation: Mental Health and Women Academics in the Current UKHE Workplace
Clarice Santos, Middlesex University, who also presented at the 2nd Accommodating Diversity in the Workplace Conference finished the first day all the way from Brazil. Clarice presented: Navigating Work, Life, and Care in Marginalized Urban Communities: Insights from Rio de Janeiro
Day 2
Day 2 started with a special session on LGBTQAI+ and the Workplace. We heard three presenters from the Breaking Binaries Research programme founded at the University of Swansea
Katrina Pritchard and Helen Williams, the founders of Breaking Binaries Research kicked off with their presentation: LGBTQIA+ Experiences of Allyship at Work
Bianca Ioana Mares, a PhD student under Katrina and Helen’s supervision then presented her work: Straight for pay’, living queer: Strategic identity performances in online sex work
Alice Elworthy, a PhD student also supervised by Katrina and Helen, finished the session with her presentation: We are what we wear: An exploration into how appearance and identity intersect at work for LGBTQIA+ and non-binary creatives
Session 2 of day 2 started with Katherine Twamley, UCL who presented at our 1st Accommodating Diversity in the Workplace conference. Katherine presented: The potential of Shared Parental Leave for transforming gendered divisions of labour
Clare Matysova, Health Data Research UK, finished off session 2 with her presentation: Approaches to and impact of EDI work in the UK’s Higher Education and Research Institutes,
The final session of day 2 started with Jagriti Tanwar, University of Westminster and Alita Nandi, University of Essex, who presented their joint research: Minority Leadership Paradox? The Role of the Ethnicity of Boss in the Wages of Ethnic Minorities in the UK
The conference closed with Feranaaz Farista, University of Cape Town who presented online all the way from South Africa. Feranaaz presented her PhD work: Negotiating Identity and Care: Gendered Labour and Religious Expectations in Contemporary Muslim Households
We are hoping to have a 4th conference in 2026 and details will be released in due course. We also run a webinar series, you can click here to register for the webinar series and catch up on previous webinars on the 2024/2025 webinar series page. We are planning the 2025/2026 webinar series and details will be released soon. If you would like to present in the webinar series, please contact Professor Sarah Jewell (s.l.jewell@reading.ac.uk).