Webinar Series 2025/2026

Located at the intersection of equality, health, disability, wellbeing, work, employment and education, the issue of staff mental health in UK Higher Education (UKHE) is growing in recognition.  Indeed, recent policy reports have already noted a sector-wide workload crisis that leaves staff overwhelmed and unable to comprehensively support students. Shifts towards workforce casualisation, work intensification, and marketization across the sector have also led to considerably low mental wellbeing amongst academic staff. Major redundancies of more than thousands of jobs, further exacerbating the workloads of remaining staff.  While all staff are affected by these conditions, their impact is not equally distributed.  Women academics are often faced by distinctively higher care responsibilities and gender-based discrimination. Exploring the interface of gender and mental health conditions of women academics in UKHE is therefore paramount.

Hadar has spent her post-doctoral career in management and health studies holding posts in Cardiff, Bristol and Lancaster. Before joining academia she worked as an employment specialist, supporting job seekers with disabilities and health conditions return to work. Her scholarship evolves around two principle areas of interest: marginalisation within the workplace, especially in the context of mental health conditions (MHCs); and the relation between intersectionality and ableism within high-performing work organisations. Her scholarship brings the study of MHCs to critical management studies in such a way that is shifting debates around MHCs at work within management scholarship, advancing knowledge and contributing to policy and practice.

Despite notable advances, women remain underrepresented in the workplace across the world, particularly in leadership roles. Persistent gender gaps highlight systemic barriers that cannot be solved by asking women to adapt or fix themselves. Instead, institutions must be “re-wired” to foster equity, inclusion, and long-term cultural change.

This webinar, Strategies to Effectively Boost Women’s Representation in the Workplace, introduces research-based and practical strategies designed to help organisations reshape workplace practices, and will discuss strategies to eliminate gender gaps, including evidence-driven solutions for leadership pathways, organisational culture, work–life balance, and structural change. In addition to exploring the RE-WIRING Toolkit, participants will reflect on their own experiences navigating workplace biases, with space for dialogue and shared learning. The aim is to equip both individuals and organisations with actionable strategies to strengthen women’s representation, close gender gaps, and ultimately build more inclusive and resilient workplaces.

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Dr Devran Gulel holds a PhD in gender equality law and politics from the University of Portsmouth and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She was previously the Jean Monnet Fellow of Turkey (2015-2017) and conducted research on the Nordic Welfare Model and gender equality at Lund University in Sweden.

Dr Gulel is actively involved in interdisciplinary research that spans various fields, including law, politics, society, and organisational studies. She also teaches a wide range of modules across Law, Politics, Sociology, and Business Schools such as EDI in business, European Union integration and law, Global Feminisms, Identity Politics, Democracy and Authoritarianism.

Along with her active involvement in EDI initiatives, Dr Gulel is also the convener of the Research Staff Forum at Portsmouth, representing fixed-term researchers.

This study examines how gendered language in performance evaluations influences the assessment of male and female employees. Using a unique dataset of reviews written by male and female managers annotated by expert linguists, we identify instances of communal and agentive language and find that agentive language benefits women more than men, with stronger effects for women who outperform. Female evaluators need to use more agentive language to effectively assess women compared to male evaluators. Additionally, agentive language used by female evaluators for male employees negatively affects their ratings. These findings highlight the spillover effects of gendered language and suggest that female
leaders face backlash when using traditionally male-associated language for male employees
and this creates disadvantage to the men working with them.

Giovanni is Professor of Economics at the University of Reading. Before joining the University, Giovanni was a Government Economist in various Departments including the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Cabinet Office and the Government Equalities Office (GEO). He was the Lead Analyst for the independent Equalities Review, which produced the report “Fairness and Freedom” and launched a new Equality Measurement Framework based on the capabilities approach. He was also Acting Chief Economist in GEO from its establishment until 2008 and has led the Secretariat to the National Equality Panel from 2008 to 2010, which produced the influential “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK”. He has been the UK representative on the Expert Group of the European Institute for Gender Equality and on various Institute’s working groups; a member of the UKRI Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory panel. He is a member of the Board of the Royal Economic Society.

This Accommodating Diversity webinar will give a summary of findings from 28 career narrative interviews conducted as part of a wider, ongoing, study on ‘What retains experienced nurses?’ funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. The study, being undertaken by the Institute for Employment Studies in partnership with University of Southampton and University of Portsmouth, aims to understand the motivations of later-career nurses and support their retention in the NHS (later career is defined as those aged 45-55 and 55+). The study is using a mixed methods approach, including the career narrative interviews, to explore factors that influence nurses’ decisions to leave, delay leaving, return to or stay in nursing.s.

With 30 years’ experience of working on skills, economic and cultural development initiatives, Astrid has an extensive track record of delivering research, evaluations and strategic leadership. Astrid believes that working with best practice employers is key to influencing policy development and changing wider employer practice and has a particular interest in flexible and high-performance working practices. Her recent work includes ‘Flexible working for all’, a multi-year project (working with Timewise, Wickes, Sir Robert McAlpine and the NHS) evidencing the impact of flexible working among frontline and site-based workers. She has delivered a flexible working review for the South East London Integrated Care System, involving focus groups across four NHS Trusts, and evaluated an initiative to enable jobseekers to access flexible working from day one. Astrid has researched autonomy and work styles for The Office Group and produced a paper on the concept of ‘unbound working’ with the support of the Institute for Employment Studies’ HR Network. This session will focus on Astrid’s latest research, exploring what retains experienced nurses.

Available soon.

Dr Melissa Carr is a Lecturer in International Human Resource Management with research interests including gender, work precarity and new organisational forms.

Melissa is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist who started her career in consultancy working for a global business psychology provider. From there, Melissa went to Ashridge Hult Business School as a client and programme director running leadership development programmes for multinational clients. Most recently she has worked at Bournemouth University as a senior lecturer before joining Henley Business School in September 2022. Melissa holds a PhD in Leadership from Cranfield University. Her research focuses on gender and work, new organisational forms and precarious employment.

In this session Claire will share brand new data about ‘inequalities in access to professional careers’ using detailed recruitment data from 17 large UK recruiters of graduates, school leavers, apprentices and interns in the accounting, legal and public sector. Using data on over 250,000 entry level applicants who grew up in the UK, Claire and her colleagues at UCL have investigated whether underrepresented groups are less like to apply to ‘top jobs’ than their peers, or whether they are equally likely to apply but are disproportionately rejected – thereby untangling barriers to application and barriers during the recruitment process. She’ll share evidence about the size of the barriers faced by applicants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnic minorities and women, and intersectional groups. She’ll also show you where employers are missing out on diverse talent using new benchmarking data, and how much of the disadvantage faced by underrepresented groups can be explained by HR data and where there are unexplained barriers.

Claire is an education and labour market economist at UCL specialising in education to work transitions, including early careers recruitment, workforce analytics, social mobility, diversity and intersectionality. She has ten years experience building data-led research collaborations with large UK employers to provide novel recruitment and progression insights for employers, industry bodies, educators and policy makers. The objective of her work is to create more socially diverse and inclusive workplaces to allow all young people to achieve their potential and contribute to national productivity and economic growth.

Claire is currently working on a Nuffield Foundation funded project researching ‘Inequalities in Access to Professional Careers’ to identify specific barriers for underrepresented groups. She is building an ‘early careers recruitment data hub’ of detailed job application and EDI data on over 2 million ‘entry-level’ job applicants – the largest research data resource of its kind. She is also working on an ESRC funded project researching ‘Inequalities in Progression within Professional Careers’ revealing barriers to career progression for underrepresented groups.

Outside of UCL, Claire is Head of Insights at the Institute for Student Employers, a membership body representing over 600 employer, university and supplier members in the early careers industry. Prior to joining UCL, Claire held corporate training and senior leadership roles at BPP meeting the education and training needs of ‘City’ employers and aspiring young professionals in the financial sector. This included preparing students for entering professional careers (leading the design and delivery of degree programmes) and enabling employers to develop early talent (graduate training programmes and leading portfolios of professional qualifications). Claire started her career working in Corporate Finance at EY as a qualified Chartered Accountant specialising in financial due diligence.

Available soon.

Elena is an executive trainer and former senior project manager with 20+ years of global experience leading complex, cross-cultural projects to improve processes and systems at organisations such as the BBC, Standard Chartered Bank, and S&P Global. This work gave her first hand insight into the challenges diverse teams face. Today, as founder of Intellectibus, she brings that experience into practical training and coaching—empowering organisations to grow, collaborate, and innovate, grounded in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and Psychological Safety. Her focus is on creating authentic, trusting environments where people feel they belong and organisations can unlock their full potential.

Louisa is an international research and content writing expert specialising in HR & Organisational Development. She is passionate about helping organisations develop evidence-based solutions and communicate insights with impact. With extensive experience in research and consultancy across the People field, Louisa provides data insights and thought leadership on HR, business, and market trends to drive informed decisions and sustainable performance. Following her MSc in Management & HR, Louisa spent over four years as Research Advisor at the CIPD in London and Singapore, where she managed research programmes on the Future of Work and Employee Experience. Louisa currently also provides integral coaching to help individuals navigate challenges, build self-awareness, and become the best version of themselves.

Available soon.

Patrizia’s research interests are in gender at work. In her current research, she seeks to better understand the experiences of women undergoing IVF while working. Her broader research interests focus on motherhood, breastfeeding and women’s bodies at work. She has a particular interest in the accounting profession, comparatively and historically, and women’s careers in Professional Service Firms (PSFs). Her past research focused on the careers of women who made partnership in PSFs in Germany and the United Kingdom and to examine the challenges women experiences on the way to partnership from a feminist perspective.

Patrizia holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics. She completed a Master’s degree as well as her undergraduate studies in Economics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Before pursuing an academic career, Patrizia worked as a financial journalist and correspondent for Reuters News and Thomson Financial, dpa-AFX and the Swedish Wire reporting on European equities and economics.

Effective workplace parental leave policies are vital to reproductive health, often facilitating support on the transition to parenthood; particularly important in countries such as the UK where statutory provision is low and there is reliance on employer enhancement. However, it is unclear whether and how employers have integrated reproductive health within their workplace parental leave policies or the extent to which inclusive workplace parental leave policy acts as strategy for reducing gender inequalities. The paper presents content analysis of a recently collated (2023/24) parental leave and EDI policy dataset of UKHE Institutions’ (n=117) and provides a UKHE sector case study with insight into policy gaps and challenges. It explores the extent to which UKHE parental leave policies anticipate the unpredictability of reproductive health on transition to parenthood, by facilitating parents’ capabilities to navigate fertility treatment, early pregnancy loss and/or contract precarity.  While good practice exemplars are identified so is the trend of bureaucratic and inaccessible policies in which anticipation of reproductive ill-health is largely hidden..

Clare has a master’s degree in research methods and a PhD in gender and social policy from the University of Leeds. Her thesis and subsequent research focuses on parental leave policy as a strategy to progress gender equality. Clare is also a culture change professional with over 20 years’ experience working in the further / higher education, voluntary and public sectors, both within organisations and as a consultant. Currently Programme Manager for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at Health Data Research UK, Clare has previously worked at the University of Aberdeen, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of East London and the University for the Creative Arts.