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Exploring the Hidden Challenges for Working Women

About

This course welcomes all undergraduate students, both women and men, across all faculties.

The course aims to develop an understanding of the hidden and subtle forms of discrimination that women continue to face when pursuing a career, by critically examining socio-cultural views about working women and their professional lives reflected in media representations.

We will examine crucial barriers to gender equality in the labour market that may seem like common sense or have been repackaged as women empowerment. We will also analyse media texts, such as career advice given to women, and uncover ideological bias that preserve the status quo by applying various linguistic concepts and approaches to these written and spoken texts.

Aims and Objective

This module aims to:

Prepare students for their career planning and development through an understanding of “invisible” gender issues that they may face in their professional lives;
Develop students’ leadership skills by providing them with the opportunity to think actively about how institutional policies can be improved to mitigate the hidden challenges faced by working women; and
Enable students to reflect critically - and independently - on gender ideologies embedded in institutional talk and texts that they may encounter in the future (such as those produced by the media) by introducing them to a useful range of linguistic concepts and approaches.

What this module involves

Participating students will need to attend four 90-minute seminars. There is one piece of assessment: a portfolio of four 250-word analyses. Each week, students will need to critically analyse a magazine article, newspaper article, or radio show of their own choice using the linguistic concepts covered in the class that week.