December 2020
For our December network meeting, we are excited to be joined by Prof Cath Noakes, who is a member of SAGE. Prof Cath Noakes will be delivering a 20 minute presentation about her career and there will be time for questions at the end.
This meeting will be taking place in teams. To join the new Women in Research teams site, please email recap@coventry.ac.uk.
Autumn 2020
The Women in Research (WinR) Network met virtually for our first meeting of the 2020/21 academic year. We took this opportunity to welcome new members of staff and PGRs to the network. We also heard your ideas about how we can all shape and get involved with the Cov Uni Women in Research Network in 2020/21.
As an outcome of the November meeting, the network has set up a Teams site to help members stay connected and as a collaboration space.
If you would like to join the teams site, please email recap@coventry.ac.uk.
August 2020
We held our summer meeting virtually in August where we decided to focus on the positive experiences we have had over the past few months. Whilst the pandemic has been extremely challenging for many reasons, a lot of members noted that there are also a number of positive things that have come out of the current situation. Adaptive ways of working and working from home has enabled some of us to spend more time with family and offered us flexibility with our many responsibilities. Although virtual working and meetings can be draining, many of us have been able to engage with things we wouldn’t have been able to in person, attend meetings we usually have to miss, and have enjoyed more accessible (and free) conferences and events. Some members also found not having to commute gave them more time, less stress and saved a lot of money. We discussed ways in which we might change our working pattern as we move through the next few months to allow for more flexible working once the pandemic is over.
June 2020
For the June WinR meeting, we joined each other via zoom webinar for an informal catch up and to see how we are all doing. We welcomed some new researchers to Coventry Univeristy, including many new Postgraduate Researchers and we also discussed some of the challenges and quirks of working in the present circumstances.
May 2020
In our May meeting we were joined by a panel of wonderful women researchers from Coventry University. We heard about three really interesting and different ways in which their work is helping towards Covid-19 and being influence by Covid-19.
We then discussed the wider impacts of the current situation – around our experiences, the challenges we are currently facing and we some top tips for managing such a sudden life upheavel. We also discussed some of the wider gender-related discussions and campaigns that are ongoing on a national scale.
The Fawcett Society recognise and support women during this ongoing situation. They have several ongoing campaigns which might be of interest on the following link: The Fawcett Society
If anyone is interested in getting involved in local campaigns around gender equality then check out the West Midlands Fawcett group, we have been holding monthly virtual meetings on Monday evenings and it would be lovely to have more people joining. Fawcett West Midlands Events
March 2020
In the lead up to International Women’s Day, we used the meeting to have an informal discussion around what we can actually do day-to-day to reduce gender bias and stereotyping and strive for gender equality. There were some really interesting points raised and our first action is to collate relevant university information and policies into a single accessible place – most likely the WinR website in the first instance. We then want to have a look at how we can make more people aware of gender inequalities and how to tackle them, possibly through linking up with existing Equality and Diversity training. If anyone is particularly interested in this then do let us know!
We have added some of the relevant university information and policies to the Further Information and Useful Documents page of this website.
January 2020 Hootenanny
As part of the Doctoral College’s Research Hootenanny we held a second Women in Research Network meeting. We discussed the feedback we had received to date and the ways in which we could use the network to try and tackle some of the challenges and barriers commonly faced by members. We also introduced Springboard – a training course for women which we will be offering in the near future, you can find more info on the ‘Development Opportunities’ page. The remainder of the meeting was spent discussing and sharing ideas for an event as part of International Women’s Day 2020, full details about the proposed event can be found on the ‘International Women’s Day’ page and we will be using the next meeting to discuss how everyone can get involved.
November 2019 Launch
We held the launch event for the Women in Research Network in November 2019 at Coventry University. We welcomed Postgraduate Researchers, early career researchers, research staff members and research support staff members who work across the University in a range of research centres and faculties. We introduced the background behind the idea to set up a Women in Research Network and posed two questions to attendees:
What are the barriers and challenges you feel you have faced as a women in research?
What do you want from the network?
We collated the feedback and distributed a survey to try and find the key priorities for the network moving forwards and some focus areas for training and development and future events.
Survey
If you would like to view and complete the survey, please do so here:
We value your feedback and thoughts as it will allow us to organise future events and training.