The internship is for 6 months on a project entitled “Women on Boards”, a project to establish role models of women who currently sit on boards. The idea is also to identify barriers obstructing women’s progression to board level – to be researched via interviews with female managers and male board members. There will also be a literature review and scope for Libby to develop a new project herself.
The plan is to start the internship towards the end of January 2014. The internship will give Libby a great opportunity to learn first-hand how to design research that can affect policy and to understand better the workings of government. Although not directly focused on ageism, it will give her the chance to gain a broader understanding of gender discrimination in the workplace and we expect this will be linked to being perceived as either too old or too young, so the fit/extension with her work is good. She will also have scope to develop another research project with the BI team that can be linked to her PhD research – this represents an opportunity to work on designs that may have direct public impact.