Lourdes
Ocampo
Project Phase 1 : Exploration
When I started the
CIC MOOC, I was planning to « debut » as a formal researcher in my
university. I taught at the “Tecnológico de Monterrey”
for 26 years and I needed a change! When I finished my “Life
Ring” exercise, I decided to focus my research in women career, because this
topic, combines my major interest in this moment: life work balance. During
summer vacations I just meet a professor from Université of Montreal who was
interested in gender research, so we talk about it, and we decided to work
together in this project.
Title Project: Women’s career in
Quebec and Jalisco (Mexico): an international perspective
Research context and implications
In Mexico many educated women are leaving the labour
market every year to take care of their family. This represents a considerable
lose in terms of talent, skills, competences and experience for companies and
society as well. Within this context, it appears particularly important to
better understand women’s career in Mexico and the factors that impact
positively or negatively the career of educated women. It is also interesting
to understand why women are opting out and why they reintegrate the labour market,
if ever they do.
In Quebec the parturition rate of women in the labour
market is much higher than in Mexico. Though the example of Quebec could be
inspiring in many ways, there is still much to do: More than 30 years of
research on the glass ceiling demonstrated how hard it was for them to reach
top management positions and how slow evolutions are occurring.
With this in mind, this research has two main
purposes:
Research objectives
1) To better understand the career paths of women with
university degree in Quebec and in
Jalisco.
2) To identify the factors that influence positively or
negatively women’s career in both states/provinces
Project Phase 2 : Design
|
Year
|
Research activity
|
Target Dates
|
|
2013 to 2014
|
1. Obtain authorization and funding to conduct the research project from universities.
2. Literature review
with search in data bases with the following key words (see next table).
3. Construct
the research instrument (questions for the interviews)
5. Collect data (Conduct 20 interview sessions)
6. Transcribe interviews of interview sessions.
7. Data analysis of interview sessions.
8. Write conference submission on qualitative
results to date.
|
09/13
09/13
09/13
10/13
11/13
12/13
01/14
|
Project Phase 3 : Experimentation and
Evaluation
For two weeks, I decided to try the interview guide. I interviewed two friends covering the
profile of my project to
experiment, fail and learn
before making "real"
interviews for the research.
I did not imagine things happened:
1) The microphone did not work and learned that I should bring a tape recorder overtime.
2) Some guide questions were not as clear as I thought.
3) The letter informed consent "scared" to my friends.
It was very rewarding to
do these tests. It was very useful remember the IFF
technique!
Another big challenge was to raise funds for my research. Usually bothers me a lot "request money". The exercise
“Bold Acts of
Defiance” helped me to try options, that in other circumstances I never would
have considered.
Project Phase 4 : Reflection
I'm still in this phase I'm too busy reading my project related articles,
is very interesting for me, notice that
when I share with my colleagues, students and friends about this project,
all manifest interest and offer help recommending books, articles, even
TV shows about this topic and also suggest women who would be willing to participate in the research.
I´m going to re-schedule some of my due dates, but
all exercises and readings of the CIC MOOC were very stimulating, especially to help me persevere and improve my ability to tolerate frustration. Thanks.
