Sponsorship award recognises outstanding theses with a focus on gender and diversity
This year, the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics has honoured two outstanding theses with the award for theses focusing on gender and diversity. The award recognises both academic excellence and social relevance and underlines the importance that the Faculty attaches to a critical examination of gender equality issues.
Challenges in accessing funding
In her award-winning Bachelor's thesis "Barriers in Female Entrepreneurship: Influence of internal and external factors on access to funding", Nisrin Al Akhal analyses the often invisible but powerful hurdles that female founders face when it comes to financing their business projects. She shows how gender-specific stereotypes and unconscious bias affect financing processes - for example, when male donors favour founders who are similar to them, or when characteristics of entrepreneurs are interpreted as "typically male".
With impressive analytical depth, Al Akhal develops a structured model of the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in the field of financing. In his speech, Dean of Research Prof. Dr. Tobias Jenert paid particular tribute to the double added value of the work: "In her excellent work, Ms Al Akhal has succeeded in developing a comprehensive model of the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in the field of financing. Such systematisation makes an important theoretical contribution, but also helps in a very practical way to uncover and deal with obstacles and inequalities."
Self-staging as the key to gender-sensitive educational work
The award-winning master's thesis "Self-staging practices as an approach to gender-sensitive educational work at the transition from school to work: observing gender stereotypes of young girls in vocational training preparation" by Sarah Schotten is dedicated to a previously little-researched approach in gender-sensitive career guidance. The focus is on the question of how schoolgirls present themselves in professional situations - for example as particularly reserved, disinterested or helpless - and which social attributions characterise these stagings.
Schotten has developed an innovative educational programme that uses the situations created by the young women themselves as a starting point. The observed self-presentations serve as moments for reflection: students are enabled to think for themselves about where their ideas about what they can or cannot do in their careers and how they should present themselves as women come from.
Prof Dr Tobias Jenert emphasised that this work starts at a decisive threshold in the lives of young women: "By working with self-presentations, they are empowered to make decisions concerning their own future more consciously and actively."
Award for work related to gender and diversity
By awarding the prize, the Faculty is once again sending out a clear signal: Gender and diversity are key topics for the future of economics. The award-winning work is an example of how academic research can help to make existing inequalities visible and open up ways to create more equal opportunities.
The Faculty expressly encourages students and doctoral candidates to continue to address these socially relevant issues and to contribute research results to social debates.
Further information on programmes to promote equality at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics can be found at: go.upb.de/programme-equality
