A team of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney will examine how gender discrimination manifests itself in the modern workplace.

The research project, dubbed ‘breaking through the Marzipan Layer’, will examine how gender inequality persists at senior management and board levels throughout the country.

“Ambitious women come to do, let’s say, a postgraduate business degree to get the hard skills to help them progress within an organisation,” says Lecturer in the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning Katrina Waite. “They don’t believe there’s any discrimination happening within the university.

“But when I started asking, ‘How do you work in groups?’ it emerged the men do the maths and quantitative stuff while these women created the PowerPoints and undertook the more discursive kind of work because they knew they were better at it. They hadn’t realised they were doing it group project after group project.”

Creative Practices Group Theresa Anderson says women often reach a layer of positions within an organisation but find they can’t progress beyond it. Recent studies suggest the strengths which women are perceived to contribute to organisations are not valued in the same way as the strengths of men.

Waite and Anderson, along with Research Officer in the School of Design Mukti Bawa, worked with UTS academics to observe the interactions between students working in their class environments. One of the subjects included in the study was the UTS Business School’s Alternative Perspectives in Contemporary Economics led by Roderick O’Donnell. While there was a balance of both sexes in the class, the gender imbalance quickly became apparent in a simulation game.

“It was so much about power,” says Waite. “All the men rose to the top in terms of positions of power and a lot of the women ended up in relatively powerless positions. We presented the findings to students afterwards and they were shocked once we told them how it played out.”

“We’re interested in creating a more mindful approach,” adds Bawa. “That extends past gender to students who may not have the best English language skills and therefore don’t verbally present well. They’ve done the research, they understand the content, but it’s the presentations that leave them behind.

“It’s about being mindful of the whole process rather than just the final outcome, and it applies to both academics and students. It’s putting subtle markers along the way to assess how the student is graded, rather than how you deliver in a 10-minute presentation at the end.”