International Women's Day 2025

How The University of Bath's Research With Impact is working towards gender equality

International Women's Day is a chance to celebrate and acknowledge women's accomplishments and highlight the ongoing challenges to achieving true equality.

Despite significant progress in gender equality over recent decades, women remain underrepresented in key public roles and continue to face gender discrimination.

Learn how research at the University of Bath is making strides in workplace equality, tackling bias in artificial intelligence, and supporting advances in women's health.

Supporting women in sport

woman playing soccer

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

Research into women's sporting injuries

Girls and women are approximately three to six times more likely to suffer an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury, which can be career-ending for athletes.

Research from Dr Sheree Bekker in Bath’s Centre for Health, and Injury & Illness Prevention in Sport, explores the intersection between societal factors and injuries for female athletes. Her recent work examines the disparity in knee injury rates between men and women, stating that gendered environments play a significant role in this disparity in ACL injury rates.

Our research is flipping the script on how we understand these injuries, moving from focusing on hips and hormones to thinking about the role that gender and the environment plays.
Dr Sheree Bekker

In 2023, Dr Bekker, was part of a team awarded two prizes from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis for their research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Their research has since been endorsed by women’s soccer organizations in Australia and the UK and has been featured in international and media presentations, including the Washington Post, Yahoo Sports and Women’s Health Magazine.

Working with Professor Stephen Mumford from Durham University, Dr. Bekker has founded the Feminist Sport Lab, a space for the application of feminist principles to sport.

Hear more about the Feminist Sport Lab.

Research at Bath has also explored how female athletes are more likely to get injured at certain points in their menstrual cycle. A 2024 study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that football players in England’s top-tier Women's Super League (WSL) were six times more likely to experience a muscle injury in the days leading up to their period compared to when they were on their period.

The research by Ally Barlow, first author of the study from the University of Bath (MSC Sports Physiotherapy 2019-2022) and a physiotherapist at the WSL club, was the first prospective longitudinal work monitoring menstrual cycles alongside injuries in female footballers.

In this study, researchers at UCL and the University of Bath recorded time-loss injuries and menstrual cycle data for elite female football players across three seasons. All of the players were based at one Women’s Super League (WSL) club, the top tier of women’s football in England. During the study they tracked 593 cycles across 13,390 days, in which time 26 players experienced 74 injuries. Analysis of the data found that players were six times more likely in the pre-menstrual phase and five times more likely in the early-mid luteal phase to experience a muscle injury, compared to when they were in the menstrual phase.

Dr Sheree Bekker

Dr Sheree Bekker

man and woman standing on field

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

Improving the health and safety of women and girls

Dr Abbie Jordan, Department of Psychology

Dr Abbie Jordan, Department of Psychology

Dr Punit Shah

Dr Punit Shah

Improving period pain management

Period pain affects 93% of teenage girls, with 36% missing school and 77% struggling to concentrate in class during their period.

Dr Abbie Jordan in the Department of Psychology is working to address the growing concern of how periods and period pain can impact the school lives of teenage girls in the UK.

Periods and period pain make school life harder for so many teenage girls, yet it’s something we rarely talk about. By working with teenage girls and boys, parents, and schools, we aim to improve knowledge, support, and period pain management.
Dr Abbie Jordan

Working with Dr Emma Fisher, Department for Health, Dr Melanie Channon and Dr Rebecca Evans, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, and Professor Lucy Bray, from Edge Hill University, the research currently involves a diverse range of up to 12 secondary schools in the UK and will better understand attitudes toward period pain and challenge misconceptions, empowering girls to tackle the barriers.

Helping diagnose autism in women

About 700,000 people in the UK are living with autism and it is under-diagnosed in females; three times as many males as females are diagnosed.

Researchers from our Department of Psychology have developed a potential new tool to help clinicians detect hidden signs of autism in adults.

Autism is usually diagnosed in childhood but a growing number of adults are being diagnosed with the condition, even in mid-to-late adulthood. Many adults develop compensatory psychological strategies to hide their symptoms from clinicians, employers and even their own families.

In the study, published in Molecular Autism, the researchers outlined a checklist of 31 compensatory strategies that doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists could look for or ask their clients about.

Dr Punit Shah from Bath's Department of Psychology co-authored the research, said: “This is an important practical step in translating recent work on compensatory strategies in autism towards clinical practice. Equally, it is important to note that it isn’t just autistic people who use these strategies and it isn’t merely a clinically relevant phenomenon.

Shedding light on the impact of domestic abuse

Research from Dr Lucy Hiscox from the University's Department of Psychology has shed light on how domestic abuse against women during pregnancy can potentially have a significant impact on how the unborn baby’s brain develops.

Working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cape Town, Dr Hiscox led a study to analyse brain scans of South African infants whose mothers had been subject to intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy. Intimate partner violence includes emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse or assault.

Publishing their findings in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, the research team reported that maternal exposure to IPV during pregnancy is associated with alterations in brain structure in young infants identified shortly after birth.

Our findings are a call to act on the three Rs of domestic violence awareness: recognise, respond, and refer. Preventing or quickly acting to help women escape domestic violence may be an effective way of supporting healthy brain development in children.
Dr Lucy Hiscox

Discover more stories

Women of the Mafia

Discover the Bath film festival from Dr Felia Allum focused on women, crime, and culture in the Italian criminal underworld.

Manual washing machines reducing labour for women and girls

Navjot Sawhney explains how the Alumni Innovation Award from the University of Bath supported his mission to ease the burden of hand-washing clothes which often falls to women and girls.

Inequalities in Supply Chains

The world loves fast and cheap fashion, but workers at the bottom of the global fashion supply chain often bear the cost. Discover how Bath research is combatting worker exploitation in the fashion supply chain.

Challenging gender bias

Using AI for ethical lending

Can AI can be used more responsibly to balance the trade-off between profits and social justice? Dr Christopher Amaral of the University's School of Management believes so. He explores how artificial intelligence can address biases to reduce discrimination in women.

Having exploring the use of AI in car dealerships in Candad, Dr Amaral found that artificial intelligence made car loan deals disproportionately less favourable for women, which exacerbated social injustice in the system. His research showed that lenders employing AI to optimise salesforce commissions could boost annual profits by up to 8% but that came at an increased cost to women.

However, his research identified that the bias against women could be mitigated by tweaking the AI algorithms behind the sales commissions and still result in a profit increase of up to 4%.

There is no doubt that AI, used unthinkingly, can worsen discrimination against women. But, if used responsibly, AI isn’t the threat that society often portrays it to be. Instead of limiting the use of AI, we should encourage firms to use it responsibly, ensuring it benefits both their business goals and social equity.
Dr Christopher Amaral

Challenging inappropriate safety workwear

Debbie Janson, senior lecturer at the University of Bath's Department of Mechanical Engineering, is recognised as one of the top 50 women in engineering in the UK for her work on improving personal protective equipment for women.

PPE is traditionally designed around a standard European or U.S. man’s form. This poses a lot of problems, not only for women, but for men who are not of average build – we all have different face and body shapes
Dr Debbie Janson

Frustrated by the ill-fitting safety footwear she was made to wear in her work in industry, Debbie's research on gender and sex differences in PPE and design inadequacies was recognised by the Women’s Engineering Society award in 2021. "Fortunately women are becoming more prepared to stand up and say, their PPE is uncomfortable or obstructive and I hope management and suppliers will respond to this,” Janson said.

Highlighting mental load

“Mental load,” also known as “cognitive household labour” refers to the thinking work needed to keep family life running smoothly. This includes scheduling, planning, and organising tasks. And in most cases, this falls onto mothers, rather than dads.

A study from Dr Ana Catalano Weeks, a political scientist from the Department of Politics, Languages & international Studies at the University of Bath, found that mothers handle 71% of household tasks that require mental effort—60% more than fathers, who manage just 45%.

This kind of work is often unseen, but it matters. It can lead to stress, burnout and even impact women’s careers. In many cases, resentment can build, creating strain between couples.
Dr Ana Catalano Weeks

By highlighting this unseen work, Dr Catalano Weeks is hoping to begin conversations about sharing the mental load more fairly—something that benefits everyone. She shares that her hope is for governments and employers to create policies that are supportive of both mothers and fathers sharing the unpaid work at home. "One policy that comes to mind is well-paid, gender-neutral parental leave – which both the UK and US are way behind on compared to the rest of Europe," she says.

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Research@Bath highlights our latest research and innovation news and events and highlights opportunities for engaging with us.