Dr Katriona O'Sullivan. Image: Keith Arkins
There will (soon) be an app for that … Lecturer and author Dr Katriona O’Sullivan is co-lead on a team making an app aimed at supporting women in research.
Researchers from seven Irish universities are calling on their fellow academics to contribute to the development of a digital resource aimed at women working in research. The planned app already has a title – Promote.
Incidentally, promotion is the order of the day; the developers want people in academia to get behind the project and share it on social media. The project’s YouTube channel includes interviews with leading women in research.
The app is currently being developed by Dr Michael Scriney at Science Foundation Ireland’s Insight Research Centre at Dublin City University (DCU).
The Promote project’s co-lead, Dr Marian Crowley-Henry, associate professor in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at Maynooth University’s School of Business, explained that the group wants to support early-career women in particular.
“There is currently no digitised network that focuses specifically on early-stage female researchers; the Promote app will be a world first,” she claimed.
As well as Maynooth University and DCU, the other academic partners are Munster Technological University, University of Limerick, South East Technological University, University College Cork and University of Galway.
Four of those universities will host a series of training sessions run by the Promote team to provide advice for early-stage women researchers.
When it is completed, the app will function as a guide not only for women already working in research but also for those considering it as a career.
Dr Katriona O’Sullivan, Maynooth academic and best-selling author of a book about her life and work called Poor, said “We know that female researchers drop out of research jobs because they find it hard to get promoted or to get made permanent or to publish.”
O’Sullivan is a co-lead on Promote. “There are myriad reasons for this – biased views, issues with confidence, fewer opportunities and fewer networks. Promote aims to fix this by creating an online platform that shares promotion information with early-career researchers and offers networking and support.”
She added that the team’s goal is to create “a network that is rich in expertise and in information about promotions, publishing opportunities [and] networking events”.
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