Spread the BBR word – share this flyer with your networks!
Use this flyer: QR Code Links to BBR UK Workforce Survey
What is this project about?
We are exploring how employees who self-identify as members of the LGBTQIA+ community – including all minority genders and/or sexualities – disclose aspects of their selves within organisations. As a result of disclosure, you may have experienced negative attitudes and treatment from others (also known as stigma).
You spend a lot of time at work; we want our research to inform best practice to create workplaces that are safe for everyone. Your response will help us to better understand how employees perceive and experience disclosure. We will use this research to develop recommendations to enhance future policy and provide guidance to employers to better support employees.
What about UK employers/managers?
A UK employers survey will be launched soon, so own your business or are responsible for managing any employees, keep an eye out for the launch of our UK employers survey!
All our research projects have undergone ethical review and approval by Swansea University. If you would like to know more about the process of ethical review please contact either Helen (helen.c.williams@swansea.ac.uk) or Katrina (k.l.pritchard@swansea.ac.uk) with any questions you may have, alternatively if you wish to discuss this research with someone else, please contact the School of Management Research Office (FHSS-ResearchSupport@swansea.ac.uk). Across all of our projects, we ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of research participants. Please note that our research projects are only open to participants aged 18 and over. Below you will found specific information for participants interested in one or more of our current projects. As part of our ethics approval we are required to provide potential participants with 1) a detailed information sheet 2) a consent form. You will find links to each of these below.
We are currently seeking participants for the following research projects:
We were really excited to have over 40 attendees for our first BBR Summer Session of 2024! While we had a bit of a technical glitch while sharing our slides in zoom we hope that those attending found the session useful. You can find the slides and the recording below and we will be also filing these with our other resources from last year’s Twilight Zone here on the blog.
If you are within Swansea University/DAiSI doctoral network you will already have been emailed details of these sessions – contact Katrina if not.
In 2023 we range the Twilight Zone Qualitative Research Series, so for 2024 we are launching the Summer Sessions:
Narrative Methods 10/5/24 10-11.30. This online session is designed for those with a basic understanding of qualitative methods but are new to narrative methods.
Research Interview Training: 10/6/24 10-11.30. This is a repeat of our popular in person session run as part of the Twilight Zone in 2023 but this time, online! Designed for anyone conducting research interviews as part of a qualitative research design, with the opportunity to practice online interviewing.
Qualitative Data Coding and Analysis: 12/6/24 10-11.30. Also repeated from our 2023 Twilight Zone Support Sessions but this time online. Ideal if you already have interview transcripts and are keen to learn the basics of coding and analysis, with a focus on Reflective Thematic approaches (Braun and Clarke, 2020). We will also demonstrate using open-source macros to code your data.
I am delighted to be a research supervisor as part of the EU and Marie-Curie funded doctoral network in sports ethics and integrity- also known as DAiSI. The doctoral network involves 17 Doctoral Candidates across 5 institutions, working with global leaders in sport such as UEFA, IOC, FIFA and WADA.
I was lucky enough to travel to Lausanne for three days last week for the first in person meeting of the network, bringing all the Doctoral Candidates, their supervisors and partners together. While my involvement does not directly relate to genders, this was a fascinating chance to learn more about all these projects and also offers a really great opportunity to understand more about issues relevant to our Breaking Binaries research.
The issues facing gender minority sports people – at all levels – is something we have already started exploring. We are working on a report looking how the history of gender in sport influences how gender minorities are being perceived, particularly in competitive and elite sport. We are also going back to the literature to understanding which research is shaping discussions, and how this leads sport governing bodies to adopt particular approaches. We look forward to being able to share this soon!
Meanwhile, my visit to Lausanne presented an opportunity to learn more about the working international sporting institutions are undertaking in wider areas related to ethics and integrity – all of which enable us to understand how sport policy operates and how this impacts gender minority sports people.
A highlight of the visit was time spent at the Olympic Museum and at the Olympic Studies Centre. Here it was great to see Caster Semenya’s memoir on display, and also a reminder of the underlying philosophy of the Olympic Movement: All sports for all people.
Helen and Katrina’s diaries are starting to fill up with plans for lots of events. We don’t have all the details yet but here are a few Save-the-Dates!
Summer Sessions Qualitative Research Methods Training
In 2023 we range the Twilight Zone Qualitative Research Series, so for 2024 we are launching the Summer Sessions:
Narrative Methods 10/5/24 10-11.30. This session is designed for those with a basic understanding of qualitative methods but are new to narrative methods.
Research Interview Training: 10/6/24 10-11.30. This is a repeat of our popular in person session run as part of the Twilight Zone in 2023 but this time, online! Designed for anyone conducting research interviews as part of a qualitative research design, with the opportunity to practice online interviewing.
Qualitative Data Coding and Analysis: 12/6/24 10-11.30. Also repeated from our 2023 Twilight Zone Support Sessions but this time online. Ideal if you already have interview transcripts and are keen to learn the basics of coding and analysis, with a focus on Reflective Thematic approaches (Braun and Clarke, 2020). We will also demonstrate using open-source macros to code your data.
More details to follow, including how to register.
We are also delighted to have been invited to present on our research at a British Association of Management event jointly hosted by the Identity and the Entrepreneurship special interest groups. This will be online on 9th May and we will add booking details as soon as we get them.
We will also be heading to academic conferences over the summer – notably Gender Work and Organization and EGOS.
Given Katrina’s past interest in Barbie you might have been wondering how come Breaking Binaries has been quiet on the movie sensation of last year. This is because Katrina and Helen were busy writing up a paper on this very subject! While we had hoped this might feature in a journal special issue later in the year we’ve now decided to go ahead and publish this on our website (see below). Don’t worry summary will still be published online to link to the special issue and we will share more information about this when we have it!
The recent Oscar nominations have brought the film back (if it ever went away) into focus with much debate about the lack of nominations for Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Greta Gerwig (Director) although both America Ferrara (Gloria) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) got the nod. In fact Ryan will also be performing at the Oscars as ‘I’m just Ken’ is also nominated for best song. No doubt this debate will continue over the Oscar season potentially drowning out other significant nominations news including Lily Gladstone as the first Native American woman to be nominated.
Lily Gladstone (Siksikaitsitapii/Nimíipuu) cements her legacy as the first Native American woman nominated for an #Oscar for Best Actress.
Join us in celebrating this historic nomination! Congratulations, @lily_gladstone!
Post for X on Lily Gladstone being nominated for an Oscar
But back to the film and our extended review! Analytically we take Katrina’s previous work on Entrepreneur Barbie as our starting point – no surprise then – but here focus in on aesthetic authenticity. We explain more about the theoretical basis to this in the full paper. Its also worth noting that while we do discuss gendering and the challenges facing minority genders, our paper mainly considers the presentation of masculinities and femininities in the Barbie movie. Analytically then we look at the character arcs of Stereotypical Barbie, (and) Ken as well as the ‘real’ women (Sasha and Gloria) and men of Mattel. Nevertheless there is, as we acknowledge, a different paper that could be written focusing on the marginalised characters in the film, especially Allan and Weird Barbie. We do mention them in our discussion and we hope to come back to this in a subsequent paper. So what did we find? Across the movie, we find that authenticity, which requires the impression of being inherent or natural, frequently turns out to be the result of a careful aesthetic construction that depends on the use of identifiable (gendered) techniques. Yet aesthetic anxiety is inescapable, even for seemingly rigid plastic dolls, aesthetic failure might be just around the corner and out of your control. Here we draw attention to the catch that this failure is also essential so that the assessment of authenticity can be secured. Our aesthetic analysis of authenticity
reveals it to reside in fragmentation, in the piecing together of disparate elements, an idiosyncratic collage which can serve to construct the authentic appearance. In this way authenticity is confirmed as performative. As an aesthetic construct, authenticity is embedded in the process of communication that is realised through the interplay between production, aesthetic object, context, and audience interpretation.
Barbie is neither straightforwardly feminist or postfeminist; yet ultimately acts to reinforce significant tenets of neoliberal postfeminism, not least since the movie is embedded within the aesthetic capitalist movement and reinforces many aesthetic ideals. Men’s (and Kens’) bodies are offered as more robust, require less fixing or are at least less problematic. For women, finding yourself might involve some discomfort or challenge, but this is simply a further opportunity for growth and development. Nevertheless we note with interest that Barbies’ can run Barbie Land free from worry about childcare, their aesthetic concerns do not extend to considering biological changes.
There is a further risk here that as we focus in on Ken and Barbie as the central characters, other – often less privileged – femininities and masculinities are ignored. Here we suggest due to the obligatory scrutiny embedded in aesthetic authenticity, Barbie does not become another Weird Barbie, she becomes a beautiful, slim, white, real woman. While the movie does offer glimpses of diversity, ultimately Stereotypical Barbie is exactly that.
We were delighted to hear shortly before Christmas that our paper, with former colleague Maggie Miller, was accepted in Management Learning. And even more please to get the news that this is now free to access online!
This paper is part of our original research on gendered expectations as and at work, and investigates how entrepreneurial advice is gendered online. This work builds on our paper published in Gender Work and Organization (also open access) in 2022 in which we explored the gendering of images of entrepreneurship.
In this new paper, we unpack how entrepreneurial advice functions examining 46 online sources (totalling 39945 words). Our analysis explores three closely related themes: be the entrepreneur, face the challenge and grow, thrive and share the secrets. We then connect our analysis to offer a critique of academic models of entrepreneurial learning. We address this in three parts; firstly, we consider the generic nature of advice and the ways in which this is situated in wider circuits of knowledge production; secondly, in relation to the production of a gendered knowing subject; and lastly, by setting out the implications of advice becoming the entrepreneurial product.
Our paper abstract is posted below:
Our paper contributes to critical perspectives on entrepreneurial learning by explicating how advice functions as an entrepreneurial product disseminated online. While academics are often critical of online advice, they nevertheless acknowledge that it is thriving. Therefore, we combine critical perspectives on entrepreneurial learning and public pedagogy to examine advice, often presented as rules, tips, and reasons, on how to become a successful entrepreneur. We provide insight into how this online advice recursively reinforces who, what, and how successful entrepreneurs should be. Subsequently we demonstrate how online advice acts as public pedagogy reproducing gendered entrepreneurial ideals that shape broader understandings of the entrepreneur.
Well yes, we are a bit late to the New Year resolutions party but we figured there was still time for a few research resolutions. If you checked our our round up of 2023, you’ll know we had a pretty busy year. Indeed 2024 has already got off to a great start – big shout out to Louisa who submitted her PhD thesis yesterday!
So what do we have planned for 2024 – here are our top three research resolutions:
Research! OK so maybe this is stating the obvious. But this is what we love and what drives the Breaking Binaries Research team. In 2023 we completed data collection and analysis for our ISBE funded, Inequalities in Entrepreneurship research project. As well as the two reports we have already published, we have already submitted two conference papers and our first journal paper is close to submission. We will also be working to share these findings across more blog posts.
So cheating a bit here and rolling a few Social Media resolutions together: Become podcast perfect … ok well perhaps not perfect! In 2023 we recorded five episodes of our podcast, getting a little more confident each time. While we haven’t got the editing process down yet, we are looking to increase our podcast production in 2024. Is there a topic you’d like us to cover? Let us know.Not caught up yet – check out our first five episodes! Get on the gram … we launched our BBR Instagram account in October 2022 (@breakingbinariesresearch) and we’ve been really grateful for all the follows and DMs, especially from research participants. But we are still not as active as we should be! We also started a Threads account but didn’t get very far. Despite falling out of love with X, this still seems to be our most used platform (@BreakBinaries). We definitely need to work harder at this in 2024 We also need to learn to love Linked in … yes that’s a long shot we know! We love our WordPress blog but academics seem to love LinkedIn. We are going to see how we can use LinkedIn more effectively in 2024. We are delighted that the very excellent Alice is going to help us out with all this and we are grateful to Swansea University SPIN scheme for funding this.
Of course there is lots more we want to achieve in 2024. Watch this space for news and updates!
While one of team BBR is already sipping mulled wine on the ski slopes, the other has the much more enjoyable task of writing our closing blog post of 2023! Many thanks to everyone who has read, participated and supported our research over the last 12 months. So much has happened…
Our research, funded by ISBE , ran throughout 2023. The first two reports from this work were downloaded 450 times from this blog and viewed nearly 500 times on the Swansea Repository! Missed out? Both our preliminary review and thematic analysis make a great read over the Christmas period. We were also incredibly grateful to all those who participated in research interviews – our analysis of these is ongoing and will feature heavily in our work in 2024.
As well as talking to our fabulous research participants, team Breaking Binaries has also been out and about! We’ve had a great time at conferences and event’s across the year, but our two standout days were at the Stonewall Cymru Workplace conference and WCS2023! We are looking forward to working further with these great organisations and continuing our work with Mountain Training in 2024.
Katrina and Helen at #WCS23 back in November
We finally started our podcast Prefer not to Say…, eventually launching five episodes which have how logged about 100 plays on Spotify. So we haven’t really hit the big time yet but have plans for lots more episodes in 2024! An extra special shout out to our seven top fans who have Prefer not to say… as their number one podcast of 2023!
Alongside team BBR, we also run the Prilliam’s Lab PGR group, a fabulous group of PhD and DBA students! We are really proud of all the progress they have made this year and really excited to see their research journey’s progress in 2024.
If you know us well, you won’t be surprised that we end with a shout out to our very special canine research assistants. Tib and Storm are looking forward to lots of Christmas treats and time in the hills over the holidays as they (and we) chill out over the festive period.
Katrina (L) and Helen (R) at WCS23 with a climbing wall in the background
November has been a busy month for the BBR team! Our highlight, however, was our trip to Liverpool and the Women’s Climbing Symposium 2023 (WCS23), held at the Climbing Hanger Liverpool Sandhills.
As academics, we spend a lot of time attending events that are for… academics; this is just part of our job. Recently, a lot has been written on what takes us away from doing research, but also how long it takes for our research to have an impact. The process of collecting data and publishing findings can take up to two years on average, in our experience it can be even longer. At BBR, we are passionate at trying to find ways to communicate our research to those that it matters most to. Those people aren’t academics. That’s why events like WCS23 are a vital part of what we do; it reminds us why our research matters and why we need to talk about it.
At BBR, our mission is simple: provide high-quality evidence on diverse identities to make workplaces safer and accessible for everyone. By everyone, we mean everyone.
WCS23 was a fantastic example of how a truly accessible space can be achieved and the positive impact it can have. This is a huge credit to the organising team behind WCS23. Their work to make the event inclusive – in every sense – reflects a broader goal of climbing in the UK.
The world of indoor climbing (in all its different forms) has rapidly evolved in the past ten years. If you want a case of a sport that is trying to be accessible and achieving it, this is a great example. In 2021, the Association of British Climbing Walls reported that around 1 million people took part in indoor climbing activities. Once seen as the smaller sibling to other forms of climbing, there are over 100,000 people regularly engaging with indoor climbing in the UK alone. But it’s not just about the numbers taking part, it’s the diverse individuals that are choosing to engage with climbing for work and/or leisure.
As one of the fastest growing sports in the UK, a lot of work has happened behind the scenes to ensure that ‘everyone is welcome in climbing’. This is about an industry – because that is what it’s fast becoming – that is not just measuring success by how many, but who participates. The growth in participation introduces many opportunities, but also challenges. Many of these challenges are ones that we see in contemporary workplaces across the UK: discriminatory practices, hateful behaviours, preaching but not practising inclusivity.
What WCS23 evidenced to us, was an appetite to not only make these challenges visible, but also to tackle them head-on through the exchanging of knowledge and technical expertise in a safe space. This is a community that is intent on making change and making it stick, and we were privileged to be a small part of it.
So, you think indoor climbing is just about pulling plastic? Go to the next WCS, you’ll see for yourself that it’s much, much, more than that.
A huge thanks to everyone that organised and made WCS23 happen!
Breaking Binaries Research 