Women make up 50% of the population, and yet they remain underrepresented and underpaid. This is an issue that needs a multi-pronged approach to be able to tackle it through social, economic, and political avenues. We need to get women more economically engaged and politically engaged, and I believe that universities are at the forefront of being able to tackle this issue. The Global Gender Gap report has shown us some troubling figures, that we're not going to be able to achieve gender equality for over a hundred years. The Academy is a research group based at Lancaster University Management School, and the group focuses on research issues around tackling gender inequality in work, in organisations. We are an interdisciplinary group of scholars based at the management school, and Lancaster University, and internationally as well. Universities have a key role in us tackling gender inequality in all aspects of society, particularly business and management schools, where we have students coming in to learn how to engage with different organisations and with society, and hopefully take important political roles in the future. The impact of the Academy can be seen across various projects that it's engaged in, for example, the European Commission funded Horizon 2020 project, targeted MPI, which is a project that's focusing on developing gender equality plans to tackle gender inequality in business and management schools in the UK, Europe, and the Mediterranean. We also have other projects, such as the Gender Matter projects, which focuses on understanding the issues that women face in organisations in the UK specifically, and we have other projects, such as the Entrepreneurship of Survival project, which focuses on refugee women and how they engage in entrepreneurship as a means of survival during enforceable displacement. The gender equality plans developed by the business and management schools have been implemented and monitored over the last three and a half years, and whilst the project will come to an end at the end of 2024, the legacy of the project will continue in its gender equality observatories, which will maintain the work that we've been doing over the last four years. Targeted NPI has worked very closely with Lancaster University's EDI initiatives, so it's been developing guides to incorporate gender awareness and inclusivity in teaching and research and innovation, and this way we're able to provide support for our academic staff members to incorporate issues around gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other marginalised groups as well in all aspects of their teaching and research. At the moment, the way that we do research is gender neutral, some even call it gender blind, and this is detrimental to at least half the population, and other minority groups also go unnoticed, so when we are looking to create solutions, we want to create them for everybody, and one way to do that is to cast a gender lens over all the research that we do at varying stages of the research as well, and we also need to be able to engage with these groups in a more inclusive way so that we can develop policies to support their progression in the future.

The Targeted-MPI project is seeking to address gender inequalities in business and management schools. Business and management schools are very complex discipline areas comprising a variety of different traditions and different methods and modes of organising and conducting research, and that leads to a lot of complexity and inequality potentially, and that's why this project is so important. Targeted-MPI is an international project, and we have got partners in four or five countries, and this is absolutely invaluable, because it allows us to explore gender equality and gender inequalities in a variety of different contexts, both organisational or institutional contexts, but also then within the national context of each of each country. And in addition, all the partners are at varying stages of their journey of gender inequality, and therefore we have the opportunity to shape and learn from each other, and shaping and learning not only institutional practices with our own university context but also national and international level policies as well. Over the past six months, I've been working as joint lead on the project with Professor Claire Leitch. It's a very crucial phase of the project, because we're looking at the development of a gender equality plan for Lancaster. We're also leading the work package across the whole partner consortium around gender equality implementation and monitoring. As part of that, we'll be developing a communication strategy which will involve workshops, publications, etc. It's absolutely vital that within our own institutional context that we involve as wide a range of stakeholders as possible. Gender is not only something with which women are involved or attached to. Gender is something which is important for all of us, and the more people that we have involved in dealing with gender and gender inequality issues, then the increased likelihood is that we will actually begin to gain traction in addressing some of the inequalities that currently exist. Gender equality is good for everybody. This isn't a question of morality. This isn't a question of being fair or being kind. This is important for us socially and economically. If women are paid equally, then that will improve the life of everybody in the household, everyone at work. It will increase employment, it will decrease turnover, and overall will improve the diversity of businesses. [Music]

So, I've been leading the Gender Matters project since 2018, and we set this up to bring together a whole range of statistics that were fairly fragmented, to understand what the pressing gender challenges are for organisations at the moment.

With the project, we're developing a brochure every two years, and we use the brochure as a platform for high-profile events. This has included things like a roundtable event with organisations, blogs, podcasts, interviews. It essentially is bringing together a group of scholars who are interested in dealing with issues around gender, gender inequality, be it in pay, but also with women, and the fact that we have so few women in leadership positions, and we are trying to raise awareness and work with a variety of stakeholders to gain knowledge and understanding but also to try and shape and influence policy.

Research into gender equality can have a practical impact on our communities, not just through education in schools and university, but also educating people in the workplace.

In order to understand issues around the gender pay gap, why there are fewer women on boards and in decision-making positions, issues around meritocracy, and so on. So we need to have a conversation, an open conversation, around these issues to try and understand how we can tackle them together as a community at work. And so that would also lead on to some policy changes that would support not just women, but men and women who want to look for a better work-family balance, particularly when it comes to parental leave.

Our aim with the Gender Matters project is to develop a long-term pattern of trends and to try and identify where there is resistance and where there are pockets of change as well.

So, the research that I do around gender issues is focused on gender and entrepreneurship in a global context. So what that means is, is to try and understand the social, cultural, political and economic environments which women entrepreneurs are a part of, and how that impacts their ability to engage in entrepreneurship in a successful way.

At the moment, I am investigating women's entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia to see how they are using it as a tool for political change.

Women across the world are still suffering with unequal pay for the same work, suffering when it comes to issues around promotion. This leads many women to turn to entrepreneurship, especially again when it comes to issues around work-family balance.

The women in Saudi Arabia are no different. However, they have to contend with inequality that is embedded within their laws and policies and regulations. So, what many of the women in my studies have done is engage in entrepreneurship, not just for economic empowerment, but they are using their entrepreneurial identity as a platform to engage in political change for other women in their communities.

Research into gender equality can have a practical impact on our communities, not just through education in schools and university, but also educating people in the workplace.

In order to understand issues around the gender pay gap, why there are less number of women on boards and in decision-making positions, issues around meritocracy, and so on. So we need to have a conversation, an open conversation, around these issues to try and understand how we can tackle them together as a community at work.

And so that would also lead onto some policy changes that would support not just women, but men and women who want to look for a better work-family balance, particularly when it comes to parental leave.

I've been doing research since 2015 on the Syrian refugee crisis. I started my research in Jordan, where millions of refugees from Syria have entered, many of which have not been able to obtain work permits and therefore have been forced to turn to entrepreneurship micro-enterprise work in order to survive and be able to pay the rent and buy food and medical supplies for their children. In our research, we were looking at displaced people, Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and one of the things with that is important for a displaced person is to find their own voice, to feel that they matter as a human being. And these things came when they were in Syria. These things came from the fact that they were in a community embedded in a social infrastructure, embedded in a local community infrastructure, and those things made their life meaningful. Now those things are washed away, and they are a displaced person in a foreign country where they're often not that welcome. So what we were interested in is - how do they make their lives meaningful again? And what we discovered is a lot of the things that are we consider maintained practices such as, for example, organising their tents, creating a garden, creating boundaries, these things were really important. The main thing is that we need to understand that refugees first and foremost don't want to leave home. They are absolutely forced to leave home. That's why they're called refugees, and when they enter into communities, they want to work, they want to integrate, but sometimes face barriers issues around work permits, language, understanding the culture. So if we take these issues into account, I think it would be a much better and easier process for the refugees and also the host communities. And again, policies need to be put into place in order to support local councils, local governments and the refugees themselves to make this process a little bit easier for everybody. Academic research in marginalised populations such as refugees, unemployed etc is really important because those are the spaces in society that need to be incorporated into the way we think about reorganising and organising society. So academic research is really important, because it's kind of like the next stage after journalism. So when things break in the news and we can witness things unfold minute by minute, something that we're very lucky that we're able to see even more with social media these days, we learn immediately about the issues of what's happening in that moment. What academic research then really can do is take these horrific circumstances, for example, the refugee crisis in Syria and the recent one in Ukraine. We can follow on to do some in-depth research and analysis to gain a true understanding of people's experiences over the long term and the side effects of the war over a long period of time, and that will better inform our policies to be able to support these people over a longer period of time in a more sustainable way. [Music]

My research interests are in humanitarian operations, so specifically, looking at what major international humanitarian organisations do in order to deliver humanitarian assistance in conflict settings, and political crisis settings as well. So, for humanitarian logistics, the concern is getting the right supplies to the right places at the right time, and in the right quantity. So ideally, you want to serve all the people who have the need. And so, the challenges usually relate to how you can get the goods through safely to these places. If you have what we call internally displaced people, and they tend to be the bulk of people who need humanitarian assistance.

There are several things that I look at in my work. The biggest one relates to being able to deliver at the end of the day.

So, the decision parameters or what kinds of decisions have to be made, or what sort of things have to be taken into account when making decisions are some of the important things that I look at.

Though, as an example, if you are going to work in any country, one of the first things that you have to understand is what kind of host government are you dealing with? What sort of regulations are they going to impose, and for what reasons? And this understanding is going to have implications. For example, how far into the future you can plan. So, do you plan a couple of months at a time? Can you plan for an entire year? You also have to think about what tends to happen in those countries outside of the main disaster that brings you there.

So, if you are there for the sake of conflict, but there's also a tendency for drought and flooding, then you also have to think about these additional humanitarian requirements and how you can set up your supply chain and systems in such a way that they can flexibly adapt and increase capacity as needed, but also be able to quickly scale down when those needs disappear.

The impact of my work is something that remains to be seen.

So the biggest issues, I think, relate to having this systematic understanding of what the key issues are and what we can already adopt from well-established operations management, supply chain management, theories and concepts.

There's also the non-typical ways of working, or the additional considerations that have to be made. So in the humanitarian setting, for example, we know now that the identity of an organisation matters not only for the types of decisions that it can make, but also how it can be perceived by different stakeholders who can affect the ability of that organisation to deliver. Based on this, humanitarian organisations do have to be mindful of how they are perceived, and how that is going to affect how much independence and freedom they have when making decisions about logistics and supply chain management.

We need more people to get involved in this type of research. I think until COVID, there was a belief that humanitarian logistics or humanitarian operations research was for a specific niche, so humanitarian problems only. But as we have seen from COVID-19, and also this conflict now in Ukraine, the types of issues that these organisations have to deal with will affect pretty much anyone in any sector, and so it becomes a rich context for exploring things that we don't know, that we have not experienced before, and for thinking more proactively about how we could adapt and be ready for whatever the future brings.

So, I think most researchers will agree that we haven't seen the worst of what can happen. There will be more uncertainty. There will be more things that we haven't experienced before. But most of what we have seen unfold during the COVID-19 pandemic, and also in this invasion of Ukraine, we have already seen in some way, shape or form in the humanitarian sector. So, it's a great opportunity to learn about what the future could look like, and be prepared for it.

My name is Dakshina De Silva and I'm an economist at Lancaster University. I'm in the Economics Department. Most of my work is on Environmental Economics and Industrial Organisation. This is a very important subject.

My colleagues and I have done a sequence of papers on environmental justice, and what we find is that polluting firms tend to locate in areas which are high minority, low-income, and low-education areas. Probably, they can get into these areas because if they have a release of a polluting incident, they have to pay lower damage fees.

If you are a policymaker who is trying to put society in better footing, understanding where firms locate; understanding how the pollution patterns are happening, is important for policymakers to understand how to implement certain issues using the correct policies.

To do that, the policymakers should understand the patterns of geographic pollution, or the locations, what kind of industries are there, and what kind of polluting materials are there. But then again, this comes from the societies they need to come up and have an understanding or better education to understand how the pollution affects their health and wellbeing.

So this is all interrelated. It is not just one piece of the puzzle. They are all interrelated, and understanding how they will work together is very important.

We also do other research on non-renewable and renewable energy. So, what we have shown is that in the areas where energy is produced, regardless of the type of energy production, it increases the median income of the county or the location. It also helps reduce local taxes and increase school expenditures.

So, coming back to your question on how the energy supply looks in the future, we have shown that wind energy can help increase the local income. Also, it can increase the school expenditures and positively affect the school budgets. So wind can be used as an alternative energy, but it is not available everywhere. But we should always look for other sources of energy to be self-sufficient. Then again, not all countries are self-sufficient in natural resources. So, looking for energy sources is always important.

My research on higher education and its financial returns has been ongoing for at least a decade. I'm in the business of teaching students, and I'm interested in how those students do, particularly how they do in the labour market. So, my research is really about the financial returns to engaging in higher education, to taking a degree.

My work has really been influential in helping government policy to think through ‘how many students should there be?' What kind of subjects that they should do,and how those students should be financed.

Students get paid according to their productivity. We all of us do. We get paid not for what we know; we get paid for what we can do. Graduates can do more than non-graduates, on average, but some graduates could do particularly well. If you're studying a curriculum which increases your productivity most, then you will earn more money, because of the things that you can then do. So, my research has revealed big differentials across degree subjects and across institutions. Different courses offer quite different financial returns to students.

I think, in a nutshell, what our research shows is that higher education matters. It matters more if you study a curriculum that contributes to your productivity; it matters more, in particular, if you contribute your own efforts to mastering what that curriculum says, because that allows you to do more. And what you get paid in the labour market is proportional to what you can do.