Our presentation on WEARY women – take three

Yesterday, I was delighted to be invited back to the OP Dept annual Summer Seminar at Birkbeck where Rebecca was presenting our work on age, gender and retirement.  This was no mean feat as based on feedback from the EGOS conference just over ten days ago we decided to make a re-cut of the data to help simplify our ‘multi modal story’.  (I say ‘we’ but Rebecca actually did all the hard work to get the data in shape for yesterday’s presentation!)

This paper has been sometime in the making.  We started with an analysis of visual data (using a similar approach to our recently published work in GWO) exploring our own and participants responses to representations of older women.  This version was presented at last year’s Gender Work and Organisation conference in Keele.

But we want to do more with our analysis and decided to combine our visual and textual data at attempt a broader multi modal consideration, albeit based on our ‘shortidutional’ selection of a particular event (news coverage of a report on pensioners and enterprise).  We took this paper to EGOS and the excellent age stream convened by Cynthia Hardy, Leanne Cutcher and Cara Reed.  There we specifically asked the question – is this multimodal approach worth the effort?  And as a result decided to cut back on the complexity – which resulted in the more streamlined presentation by Rebecca at the Birkbeck Summer Seminar yesterday.  This still includes both text and image but focuses on our analytic consideration rather than the more complex method of also including audience responses.  This loses some richness but importantly we hope will make the paper easier for the reader to follow.

Now we just have to finish it and actually submit it to a journal!

Interestingly, age also cropped up in Lynda Gratton’s discussion of the future of work.  Lynda was giving the ‘Alec Rodger Memorial Lecture’ yesterday evening and discussed the challenges of the ‘100 year life’, particularly focusing on the economic considerations of such longevity for today’s younger people.

Here’s Lynda discussing other big trends for the future of work as part of her fascinating lecture last night: