In memoriam: Professor Barbara Bagilhole

Submitted by valentina on Thu, 06/25/2015 - 11:58

It is with great sadness that the GenderTime consortium announces the death of Barbara Bagilhole, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy and Equal Opportunities at Loughborough University (UK) and member of the GenderTime consortium, on 16 June 2015.

 

Since the 1990s, Barbara collaborated on many European research projects and her research made significant contributions internationally in the fields of social policy and equal opportunity and diversity. Her varied research career, which was ground-breaking in many ways and always animated by her strong feminist commitment, included studies on women in science and engineering and women in higher education. She made a crucial contribution to our knowledge of women's disadvantaged position in higher education and was an active participant in feminist academic networks across Europe and beyond. 

 

HELENA project meeting, Bilbao, Spain, 21 - 22 October 2010

 
Barbara’s research that brings to the fore women’s experiences in male dominated fields has provided the groundwork for move away from a ‘fix the woman’ approach, providing empirical evidence that inequality is a structural/cultural issue. Her work importantly gave a voice to women in male dominated spheres and raised questions about the ethics of trying to increase the numbers of women (in construction, for example) without also changing the culture of the sector.
 
In the HE sector, Barbara’s experience as Associate Dean at Loughborough and her work on women’s experiences in higher education, based on qualitative and quantitative evidence across a range of institutions and disciplines, has been influential in recent developments in gender equality in the sector (for example, Athena Swan Charter, Aurora Programme for women in HE run by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education).
 
Barbara’s research highlighted the need for cultural change at all levels in industry and in educational institutions. The need for organisational change has been, at least in part, accepted. In FP7 and Horizon 2020 the European Commission has set about an ambitious programme for enacting organisational change and ‘gender’ as a cross cutting issue must now be considered in all future EU funded research, regardless of the focus. In the UK, the construction sector is beginning to come to terms with the need to build organisational practices that encourage the recruitment and retainment of diverse workforces, though change is slow and there is much work still to do in this area.
 
Barbara co-founded the Women in Higher Education Management (network) and has been extremely active in building a research community around these issues. As markers of her esteem, she was an invited member of the World Institute for Engineering and Technology Education (WIETE) in recognition of a significant contribution to engineering and technology education and she was also a member of the Professional European Association of Women’s and Gender Studies.

GenderTime Knowledge Transfer Workshop,  Padua, Italy, on 11 June 2013 

 

Yvonne Pourrat (Gendertime project coordinator and colleague of many years) responds to the news by stating:  "Barbara Bagilhole was an outstanding researcher in gender issues in engineering. She was one of the first to highlight the particular situation of women in technology research and careers. She was very well known in France where she was invited several times to explain her point of view. A special reference must be made to her European engagement through leading research projects and monitoring expert groups".

Anita Thaler (IFZ, colleague of many years) adds ‘I learned a lot about and from Barbara. Her positive way of communicating and her ability to combine both working very seriously and enjoying life, was an inspiration to me’.

 

Barbara will be greatly missed by all members of the GenderTime consortium and we will endeavor to continue working in the field she helped to establish.