We are a group of researchers based at the University of Reading working on a range of projects focusing on best ways to accommodate diversity in the workplace. We aim to understand issues relating to diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and consider the implications for good workplace practice and policy. We want to collaborate with organisations to understand key challenges and constraints and co-design workplace place and guidance on best workplace practice. Please see here for more information and our current projects to find out what we are currently working on.
Our researchers
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Professor Sarah Jewell is an applied labour economist who is interested in gender equality in the labour market with a particular interest in women’s health and fertility in the workplace. She is the principal investigator of the Nuffield Foundation funded project “Maternal well–being, infant feeding and return to paid work decisions” (see current projects)
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Professor Simonetta Longhi is an applied economist whose research focuses on understanding how circumstances and people’s behaviour create unequal outcomes for disadvantaged groups such as women, ethnic minorities, or people with disabilities. She is also interested in understanding how such inequalities develop over people’s lives and across generations.
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Dr. Sam Rawlings is an applied economist, whose work focuses on economics of the household and gender, considering decisions around female labour supply and fertility, as well as studies on gendered violence.
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Dr Tatiana Rowson’s work is multidisciplinary in nature and is informed by theories from psychology, sociology and social gerontology. Her research interests are the topics of ageing, work and retirement, silver entrepreneurship and age diversity at work. Her recent projects explore the topics of inequalities between groups, cumulative advantages and disadvantages, precarious work conditions, age discrimination (gendered ageism) and disrupted trajectories (transitions) in the life course.
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Dr Karen Jones is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Management at the Institute of Education, who is interested in women’s careers and gender equality in the workplace, with a particular interest in career capital, identity, identity work and identity regulation, neoliberalism and neoliberal subjectivity and postfeminism.
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Dr Frances Hamilton holds a PhD in Law from Northumbria University together with qualifications and practical experience of a solicitor. She is interested broadly in themes connected with Gender and the Law. At present she has a couple of ongoing projects connected to Diversity in the Workplace. One relates to potential challenges faced by LGBT persons when working or travelling abroad. She is also co-editing an edited collection around the theme of the Gender Pay gap.
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Professor Sylvia Jaworska’s research is concerned with professional communication, specifically with the ways in which various forms of media, business and health communications perpetuate social stereotyping and biases in relation to gender, age, race, ethnicity and expected social roles (motherhood, ideal worker etc). My approach to research is based on quantitative and qualitative methods commonly used in linguistics and social sciences to study discourse and communication; it mostly involves a computational and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, which allows for exploring systematic patterns of discourse and biases in large collections of texts.