Gender’s many faces

Over the past two years, Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies (UCCGS) has brought together scholars from across the University into a vibrant teaching and research community focused on the understanding of gender. Today, academics from 23 different departments – from the social sciences, humanities and arts, right through to the physical sciences, technology and biomedical sciences – are actively engaged with the Centre, as are an impressive series of visiting international scholars.

Although the Centre has existed for over a decade as a successful public events and postgraduate training resource, an endowment two years ago from Jessica and Peter Frankopan of the Staples Trust enabled it to begin a new and exciting process of development, launching an MPhil course and its own research programme.

Now, with academics from such a broad range of fields contributing to its intellectual landscape, the Centre demonstrates a remarkable and in many ways unique multidisciplinary approach to research and teaching, as Dr Jude Browne, the Centre’s Frankopan Director of Gender Studies, attests: ‘The study of gender at the Centre benefits immensely from having evolved from an engagement with diverse front-line research topics rather than from any one particular discipline, political view or methodology… Gender at the Centre is about all humans whatever their identities, condition or experiences.’

Issues tackled at the Centre encompass this holistic approach and range from what the latest advances in biomedical sciences tell us about gender, to how gender is used in conflict, to what we can learn about gender from antiquity, to how we could combat sexed-based inequalities in the labour markets. The result, as Dr Browne describes, is a ‘different, and sometimes clashing, research perspective that gives us a wonderfully encompassing view of the implications of gender.’

From head-hunting to HIV transmission

The two most recently funded research projects at UCCGS exemplify the extraordinary breadth of gender research.

Dr Browne, whose research was featured at the Hay Festival this year, is a specialist on sex segregation and inequality in the modern labour market. A three-year project she is directing will evaluate gender bias in the assessment and selection of top executives for recruitment (with Monica Wirz, PhD candidate in the Centre). Egon Zehnder International, the largest privately owned executive search firm, has funded the project following their recent finding that the proportion of women on the boards of UK FTSE companies is only 12.6%. ‘It’s dismal how little diversity there is in chief national and international posts,’ comments Dr Browne. ‘We need to link up the thinking behind selection processes at the very highest recruitment levels with that of the latest critical thinking in gender studies.’

Dr Andrew Tucker, Assistant Director of UCCGS, leads a Centre project focusing on HIV transmission in South Africa, which continues to exhibit one of the worst epidemics of HIV. The United States Agency for International Development is funding this groundbreaking two-year project through the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The study is aimed at reducing transmission in marginalised at-risk communities in South Africa – specifically men who have sex with men (MSM). What little work has been done on addressing this group’s health needs has focused overwhelmingly on measures such as condom distribution; this project instead plans to examine the benefits of reducing social and economic discrimination, and an endemic sense of fatalism, which affect MSM in township environments.

Bequest to ‘spark young minds’

Thanks to a recent substantial bequest from Professor Carl Djerassi (inventor of the first oral contraceptive pill) in memory of his late wife Diane Middlebrook, the community of Cambridge researchers working on gender is being extended by the launch of the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies, bringing internationally renowned scholars to the Centre. The first to visit is Professor Marcia Inhorn, a leading medical anthropologist from Yale University whose research focuses on ‘reproductive tourism’ – the search for assisted reproductive technologies and human eggs, sperm and embryos across national and international borders.

During their research period at UCCGS, each Visiting Professor will explore opportunities for continuing collaborative research with the Centre and offer guidance and intellectual leadership to junior researchers and students. As Professor Djerassi remarks: ‘What better way of honoring the memory of my wife than bringing great teachers from all over the world to spark younger minds.’