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.