Brunch webinar series: Involving civil society in the promotion of RESISTIRÉ’s recommendations

Concluding its first research cycle, RESISTIRÉ delivered a set of 8 factsheets to support policymakers, advisers, employers, and civil society organisations in understanding the impacts of Covid-19 policies on gender equality, and to suggest practical recommendations to mitigate these effects. These recommendations can also serve to safeguard against the societal impacts of future crises. 

To discuss these recommendations with civil society and involve interested representatives in the advocacy process, we are organising a series of seminars that will introduce the factsheets and give civil society organisations the opportunity to share their experiences. The first webinar focused on gender-based violence and the second addresses care.

Webinar: Care and Crisis – Fostering a Paradigm Shift

The lockdowns following the COVID-19 outbreak led to an abrupt change in the work and care sectors. The sudden imposition of telework, the necessity of staying at home, and the closure of many care facilities had a strong impact on people with caring responsibilities and our research points to the reinforcement of pre-existing care and labour gaps in Europe during the pandemic.

Illustration: Aslı Alpar

Webinar agenda

In this webinar titled Care and Crisis: Fostering a Paradigm Shift, we discuss some of RESISTIRÉ’s findings and recommendations included in the factsheets on care and telework, and panellists share their stories regarding promising practices and main obstacles encountered during the pandemic.

Dr Sara Clavero, Senior Researcher at Technological University Dublin, and Dr Agnieszka Kolasińska from the Institute of Sociology at the Czech Academy of Sciences introduce the topic and moderate the event. The webinar is divided into three panel discussions:

• Caring Workplaces

Monique van Alphen, HR Policy Officer at Tilburg University, presents the extraordinary measures and regulations put in place by the university to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on employees with caring responsibilities.

• Strategies for increasing paternal engagement

This panel discussion is led by Dr Clare Stovell, Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

• Multifaceted nature of work: recognition of unpaid and informal care

Dr Nikki Dunne, Research Officer at Family Carers Ireland, discusses the main challenges her organization and its clients had to face during the COVID-19 pandemic and main initiatives taken by the charity to alleviate caregiver burden in this period.

Panellists

Monique van Alphen is graduated in Work and Organizational Psychology and has 25 years of experience as an HR professional in the government and higher education sector, with additional training in the field of career coaching.

She worked as an HR advisor within several municipalities and has been employed at Tilburg University – a thriving, medium-sized, multi-disciplinary university oriented towards the humanities and social sciences and aiming to contribute to solving complex societal issues – since 2002. After having worked as an HR advisor at several Schools, she became policy officer in the HR policy department in 2019. In this position, she is responsible for several themes including Community, Well-being, Hybrid Working, Employee surveys, and Employability.

Dr Clare Stovell is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Diversity Research Policy and Practice at Oxford Brookes University. She is an interdisciplinary, mixed methods researcher whose expertise lies in investigating and understanding gender inequalities, with a particular focus on gendered divisions of work and care. Clare is currently coordinating Oxford Brookes’ contribution to RESISTIRE. She is also a co-investigator on Women in Science: UK-Brazil Gender Equality Partnership and is involved in GEARING-Roles, as well as being the co-founder of the Oxford Network of European Fatherhood Researchers doctoral group and a member of the Working Families Research Network and the Government Equalities Office Workplace and Gender Equality research network. Previous research has focused on couple decision making at the transition to parenthood; work-care divisions; parental leave; and fathering and masculinities.

Dr Nikki Dunne is Research Officer with Family Carers Ireland, the national charity supporting the 500,000 family carers across the country who care for loved ones such as children or adults with physical or intellectual disabilities, frail older people, those with palliative care needs or those living with chronic illnesses, mental ill-health or addiction.

As the organisation’s Research Officer, Nikki leads Family Carers Ireland’s programme of research and manages a diverse range of qualitative and quantitative projects relating to family carers. She is particularly focusing on building and coordinating research involvement and engagement among family carers, researchers and other stakeholders.