This project uses game-based methodology in the form of a research-informed board game, Playing The HE Career Game, to generate new data relating to targeted career development interventions for women. The project will engage with higher education (HE) workforce development, gender equality professionals, academics and stakeholders in a series of five Workshops, each hosted by a different UK higher education institution. The workshops, facilitated by the project’s Principal Investigator, aim to uncover assumptions about the benefits of targeted career initiatives in the HE sector and to build organisational awareness of the way structural factors impact women’s lived experience of career progression.
The research therefore asks:
- What implicit and explicit assumptions inform the provision of targeted career initiatives for women in HE?
- To what extent can a game-based methodology influence professional and organisational understandings of structural, social and individual factors women encounter in the pursuit of career progression in HE?
- What macro/meso/micro changes can organisations and stakeholders put in place in response to issues raised by the playing and discussion of Playing the HE Career Game?
- How can such changes challenge strategies of centring disadvantaged groups and individualised pathways to success as a response to forms of workplace inequalities?
While a typical response to workforce inequalities, in HE and other sectors, is the provision of targeted career development initiatives for marginalised groups, these are often individualised discourses which mask constraining structural and organisational factors. This innovative and outward-looking project aims to engender greater organisational awareness of the way such structural factors impact women’s lived experience of career progression and to catalyse focused and informed mitigations. Findings will also be of relevance to other marginalised groups in the HE workforce and to other sectors.
Project Team
Principal Investigator - Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas, Associate Professor in Higher Education and Gender, Department of Education, School of Law and Social Sciences.
Project Impacts
Gender inequalities in the HE workforce are longstanding and stubborn. These inequalities are exacerbated in intersection with race, disability, age and social class.
Distinctive elements of this proposal include:
- the use of an existing primary dataset relating to experiences and ongoing outcomes of a career development intervention for female staff in a large, modern UK university;
- the transformation of that dataset into a bespoke board game The Career Game, adapted from the traditional board game Snakes and Ladders;
- the engagement with a range of relevant professional stakeholders across the UK HE sector through gameplay, facilitated discussion, evaluation and action planning.
