Our Visiting Faculty are a valuable resource, bringing expertise from the worlds of journalism, academia, business and big data to bear on select GIWL projects.
Jeanette Ashe
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
Dr. Jeanette Ashe holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London and she teaches politics at Douglas College in New Westminster, Canada. Her areas of focus include political recruitment, political parties, political representation, and gender and politics. She advises parliaments, governments, parties, and non-governmental organisations on gender- and diversity-sensitive parliaments, gender equity policy, and democratic reform. Recent publications include her book Political Candidate Selection: Who Wins, Who Loses and Under-representation in the UK (Routledge) as well as Feministing: Lessons from Bill C-237 – The Candidate Gender Equity Act 247, The Implementation of Equality-Based Candidate Selection Decisions in the British Labour and Conservative Parties, Gender Sensitising Parliament: A Seven-Step Field Guide, Canada’s Political Parties: Gatekeepers to Parliament, Gender Sensitivity Under Trudeau: Facebook Feminism or Real Change? Her other publications can be found in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Party Politics, British Politics, and the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy.
Sarah Childs
Visiting Professor
Sarah Childs is Professor and Personal Chair of Politics and Gender at the University of Edinburgh. She has a background in Political Science and Women's Studies. Her research centres on the theory and practice of women's political representation, gender and political parties, parliaments and institutional change. Childs latest book, Feminist Democratic Representation (co-authored with Karen Celis), was published by OUP in 2020, and jointly won the PSA W.J.M. MacKenzie book prize in 2022. Childs is also author of The Good Parliament Report, 2016, which followed a secondment to the UK House of Commons. She is finalising her new book, Designing and Building Feminist Institutions, which will be published in 2023.
Cordelia Fine
Visiting Professor
Cordelia Fine is a psychologist and Professor in the History & Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of A Mind of its Own and Delusions of Gender (a Guardian and London Evening Standard book of the year and a Washington Post non-fiction Book of the year).Her most recent book, Testosterone Rex, won the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. She has written on gender bias in science in publications including Science, the Lancet, Scientific American and the New York Times.
She was the recipient of the 2018 Edinburgh Medal, a prestigious award that recognises scientists who have excelled in their field and contributed significantly to our understanding of humanity.
Carrie Gracie
Visiting Professor
In a BBC career spanning more than three decades, Carrie Gracie has served as China Editor and Beijing Bureau Chief, as well as a presenter on the BBC News Channel and host of weekly BBC World Service programme The Interview.
In January 2018, Gracie left her post as BBC China Editor in protest at unequal pay. In June 2018, she won an apology and pay parity from the BBC. She donated all her back pay to the gender equality charity the Fawcett Society to help low-paid women facing pay discrimination. She continues to serve as a BBC News presenter and as a member of the BBC Women group.
Zabeen Hirji
Visiting Professor
Zabeen Hirji was Chief Human Resources Officer and a member of the Royal Bank of Canada Group Executive in Toronto from 2007 to 2017. She is now Board Chair of CivicAction, Global Advisor for Futures Work at Deloitte and Special Advisor to the Clerk of the Canadian government’s Privy Council on Diversity and Inclusion. She is a prominent advocate and spokesperson for diversity and inclusion in Canadian business and has received numerous awards for championing the advancement of women and minorities. She holds an MBA from Simon Fraser University and received their Outstanding Alumni Award for Professional Achievement. In 2016 she was recognized with Canada's Meritorious Service Medal for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion.
Anne Laure Humbert
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
Dr Anne Laure Humbert is a Reader in Gender and Diversity and Director of the Centre for Diversity Policy, Research and Practice at Oxford Brookes University. Anne has worked extensively on developing methodologies and indicators for measuring gender equality in multiple settings. She specialises in applying advanced quantitative methods to comparative social and economic analysis. She has previously held positions at Cranfield University and Middlesex University London.
Recent and current projects include looking at the impact of gender and diversity in STEM research teams, implementing gender equality plans in universities across Europe, gender, pay and working condition in nursing for the Royal College of Nursing and assessing the feasibility of creating an award or certification system for gender equality in Europe. Some recent publications include: “A rights-based approach to board quotas and how hard sanctions work for gender equality”, European Journal of Women's Studies 2019, with Kelan and Clayton-Hathway; and “The perils of gender beliefs for men leaders as change agents for gender equality” European Management Review 2018, with Kelan and van den Brink.
Arantxa Lopetegui
Visiting Professor
Arantxa Elizondo has been a Professor in the Department of Political Science of the University of the Basque Country since 1991. She is Co-director of the Master's degree in Equality of Women and Men (since 2000), and she was Director of the International Election Observation Postgraduate of the University of the Basque Country (2013-2015). She was the General Secretary of the Basque Institute of Women, Basque Government (2009-2012). She was member of the committee appointed by the Basque parliament to prepare the proposal of the new Statute of the Basque Country (2018-2020). She is currently the President of the Spanish Association of Political Science, AECPA (since 2017).
Her main research fields are feminist studies and equality policies. She has published several works on public policies of equality and political behavior and participation of women. She has also taken part in research projects on functioning of Public Administrations. She is member of the team that carries out a research project funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness on equality policies in universities.
Joni Lovenduski
Visiting Professor
Joni Lovenduski is professor emerita at Birkbeck College London. An internationally acclaimed scholar, her research focuses on gender, politics and political institutions.
Her awards include the Gender and Politics Award of the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Gender and Politics (2009), the UK Political Studies Association’s Sir Isaiah Berlin prize for lifetime achievement in political studies (2013) and the European Consortium for Political Research award for outstanding achievement in political science (2017). Her book Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class was awarded the American Political Science Association George H. Hallett 2018 prize for a pathbreaking book that is still influential ten years after publication. She received an honorary Doctor of Science in Social Science degree from the University of Edinburgh University in 2017.
Fiona Mactaggart
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
Fiona Mactaggart is a British Labour Party politician and former primary school teacher. She was the MP for Slough from 1997 until 2017. Prior to this she was a councillor and Leader of the Labour Group on Wandsworth Council from 1988 to 1990, becoming a lecturer in Primary Education at the Institute of Education and Chair of Liberty from 1992 to 1997. In parliament, Mactaggart served at the Home Office as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State and as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities under Labour leader Ed Miliband. Mactaggart has a BA in English from King's College, an MA from the Institute of Education and a PGCE from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2018 she was appointed Chair of the Fawcett Society.
Tracy Osborn
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
Tracy Osborn is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Iowa and a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Iowa Public Policy Center. Her work focuses on electing women to office and how women legislate once elected. Her book, How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender, and Representation in the State Legislatures, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. She has also published in journals such as Politics & Gender, Legislative Studies Quarterly and Political Research Quarterly, among others. Her current work examines groups who recruit women candidates to run for office.
Jonathan Rankin
Visiting Research Fellow
Jonathan Rankin is the Head of Data at MyTutor, where works with data analysts and data scientists to help the organisation understand the impact of their decisions and improve the quality of tuition students receive from their tutors.
Before joining MyTutor, Jonathan worked at The Guardian for 7 years, undertaking various roles across software engineering, product management and data. As a founding member of the Contributions team, he spent 3 years working on establishing a new reader-funded business model that reduced the organisation’s dependency on advertising. He first got involved with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership through his work at The Guardian on an application that used natural language processing to analyse Guardian articles through a gender lens.
Jonathan graduated from the University of Bristol in 2015 with a MEng in Computer Science.
Mary Ann Sieghart
Visiting Professor
Mary Ann Sieghart has spent most of her life as a journalist and broadcaster. She was at The Times for nearly 20 years, as Assistant Editor, Comment Editor, Arts Editor and political columnist, and has also worked at the Financial Times, The Economist and The Independent. She presents programmes on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. She spent 2018-19 as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, researching and writing a book about women and authority – how and why we still take women less seriously than men – and is currently a Senior Academic Visitor at Oriel. She also chairs the non-partisan Social Market Foundation think tank and is a trustee and chair of the investment committee of The Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian and The Observer. She is senior trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust and has sat on the boards of Tate Modern, Ofcom’s Content Board, the Heritage Lottery Fund and three large FTSE-quoted investment trusts.
Victor Sojo
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
Dr Victor Sojo is a Lecturer in Leadership at the Centre for Workplace Leadership, the University of Melbourne. Victor’s research is multidisciplinary and intersectional. He focusses on factors that facilitate and hinder gender equality in occupational and sport contexts, such as harassment, work-family conflict and unconscious bias. He also studies diversity management strategies, leadership development/emergence, and the impact of gender inequality on public health outcomes.
Victor has worked extensively with public and private sector organisations, conducting research, training and consulting. His research and thought leadership has been published in top-tier journals such as Leadership Quarterly, Psychology of Women Quarterly and the Lancet among others.
He completed a BSc in Industrial/Organisational Psychology, a MSc in Health Psychology, and a PhD in Psychology at Melbourne University.