Work and Organisational Psychology
The group has generated a great deal of press interest recently with coverage of Lynne Purvis’ work on women’s experiences of taking maternity leave and Almuth McDowall’s study of age and gender effects on the availability of training, featuring in both the local and national press.
Lynne’s paper, ‘The transition to motherhood in an organizational context: An interpretative phenomenological analysis’ prompted requests for interviews with Radio 5 live, Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show Eve Magazine and the Sunday telegraph to name just a few.
Lynne: The study was prompted by friends and colleagues experiences of returning to work after maternity leave though I must say that my own experience was very different.
The eight women that she interviewed were working full-time and in each case were due to take maternity leave prior to the birth of their first child. All of the women felt that as their pregnancy continued they became invisible to the organisation that they worked for and felt alienated by colleagues attempts to organise cover for their leave period without consulting them. They also reported difficulty in integrating back into the organisation when they returned and establishing themselves as both a mother and employee. Those who had kept in touch with work either socially or psychologically found the return to work less daunting and less problematic.
Lynne: Recently, the Government have introduced a ‘keeping in the loop’ addendum to the law on maternity leave so women can legitimately keep in touch and not risking losing their maternity leave through an unwitting declaration that they are officially returning to work. This was influenced by my work so I’m delighted that it has informed such a major decision.
Almuth, who is currently on maternity leave herself, was fielding press enquiries just hours after her daughter’s birth as her paper ‘How age and gender affect the allocation of training and development budgets’was presented at the BPS’s Division of Occupational Psychology Conference on Friday 12th January 2007, caught the media’s attention.
Almuth: Unfair discrimination on grounds of age, gender or other demographics is illegal in the UK. However,there is no doubt that this continues to happen, with many published court cases and big compensation payouts providing the evidence. Surprisingly, the area of training and development has received little attention in this context. Whilst many theorists proclaim that training and development are now self-led, with workers and not employers taking charge, in reality time and budgets have to be made available to employees to engage in related activities. In other words, if your manager and organisation do not support you, how can you make life-long skill development happen?
We did a ‘vignette study’ using hypothetical but realistic scenarios detailing requests for training and development budgets from employees. Nearly 50 managers from all over the UK took part, it was their task to allocate budgets across our fictitious employees, and justify their decisions. Our findings support our hypothesis clearly – older women were given significantly lower budgets. Of particular interest were the justifications for these decisions – a couple of managers commented that ‘they did not want to be ageist’ and that we ‘seemed to want to force a choice between younger and older employees’. So why did the differences occur nevertheless? Justifications were largely based on return on investment – older women are simply not perceived as offering a good return.
I am hoping to follow up on this initial study within our occupational psychology research group, by doing some more experimental work on managerial decision making in training and development to replicate the effects observed here, and to determine the reasons for existing bias more clearly.
Niamh Murtagh presented a paper at the 1st International Coaching Psychology Conference 18-19 December 2006. called "What barriers? Women's experience in changing careers" (N.Murtagh, E.Lyons, P.N.Lopes) and a poster at The British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference 10-12 January 2007 entitled: "What makes a career barrier a barrier? Women's experience of changing careers" (N. Murtagh, P.N. Lopes, E.Lyons).
