Dr Lauren McCarthy, University of London

Dr Lauren McCarthy, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Hosted by Dr. Vivek Soundarajaran Department of Strategy & International Business; Dr. Scott Taylor, Department of Management, Birmingham Business School.

Lauren's research interests centre on corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Specifically, she researches gender and inequalities, often within production in global value chains. She is also interested in contemporary feminism, particularly online feminist activism and social change in digital spaces. 

Toxic masculinities and misogyny are significant aspects of everyday life in contemporary workplaces. This is in spite of more than a century of feminist activism, theory development, and education aimed at challenging sex discrimination practices and cultures of intolerance. Birmingham Business School is leading research in this area in two ways:

• Generation of external corporate start-up funding for the development of a Centre for Responsible Business (CRB);
• Collegiate development of a Work Inclusivity Research Group (WIRG), bringing together researchers across the School and College of Social Sciences

The fellowship will allow exploration of the significance of masculinised practices, cultures, and economies. The resurgence of toxic masculinities, and the implications of this for women and men’s working lives and provide an empirical focus for theoretical development. The study of toxic masculinities within workplaces in the global North, and within different sections of global value chains, and how this challenges gender equality efforts, is a new and exciting area for organisation studies.