My name is Kate Grosser.
My overarching research question is
really
how do we apply
gender equality and other human rights
in the context of the growing power of
business in society. We have
a whole lot of laws that are applied by
government or regulations in
various different countries but it
doesn't look as if that regulation is
going to be improved
much upon. I was working in the UK
context when I became interested in the
fact that there are all these new kinds
of soft law developing:
new kinds of regulation that involve
business government and civil society
but and I wanted to look at the way
gender equality, in particular, but other
human rights as well,
were included or not in that agenda and
whether that agenda could be useful
for those people working in the
space around gender and human rights.
Before that I had been working
very much around government
accountability so when I started out
in this area of work I began by looking
at the whole process of how do you
mainstream
gender into any area of work.
Mainstreaming gender equality is
both a technical and a political
process so I became interested in how
is gender visible in
data that companies report around
corporate sustainability or corporate
social responsibility.
Also political processes of
participation: who gets to play a role
in deciding what matters and in holding
organizations to account.
What drives me is I've always been
interested in gender equality
and it seems to me that while in some
ways we're going forward, in other ways
we're actually going backwards.
So what drives me is a passion for
thinking about
gender equality
and how to drive change.
And really i'm interested in how do we
drive change in the context of a
changing governance environment which
increasingly involves the private sector
as well as government and the challenges
to keep moving forward rather than
backwards in that context.