CYGNA: Research networking meeting in gender & diversity

Reports on our 65th CYGNA meeting where we shared our research interests in the general area of gender & diversity with the aim of building research collaborations

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Wed 21 May 2025 07:28)

Our 65th meeting was organised by a team of four CYGNA sisters: Seonyoung Hwang (Royal Holloway, UK), Emamuzo Idegbesor (Univ of Westminster, UK), Tina Miedtank (Radboud Univ, the Netherlands), and Huong Nguyen (LaTrobe Univ, Australia). They didn't know each other (well) before organising the meeting, so the first connections were made in the meeting preparations.

The meeting topic was clearly of great interest to our CYGNA members. Our May meeting is usually one of our quieter meetings, as it it coincides with heavy marking, early conferences, and general end-of-year fatigue. Even so, we had no less than 37 participants coming from all over the world, 34 of which can be found in the above picture.

The organizing team had been worried that we wouldn't be able to fill the two hours. But as always in our CYGNA meetings, the time flew by and we could easily have filled another hour. Many of us had to be forcibly removed from our break-out rooms mid-sentence :-). The team had created a great program for us, with a warm-up quiz, speed-dating, and thematic networking.

Warm-up quiz

We started with an ice-breaker in the form of a quiz run by Seonyoung Hwang who had come up with five very interesting quiz questions for us. Two of them are shown below: the number of CYGNA members with an interest in diversity and the challenges in doing Gender & Diversity research.

A particularly original quiz question was: How you would describe and explain the concept of equality, diversity, and inclusion to a 6-year old child? Here are some interesting suggestions.

Accepting and embracing that we are all different and that this is wonderful thing that makes our world a better place for everyone!

Treat people the way you want to be treated.

It is three things. Think that when you are in a football team you want mates who have different skills. They have to all feel appreciated to give their best, right? And if someone is injured, there is no blame.

I'd use a metaphor: patchwork quilts, fruit salad etc.

There was a great picture I saw once with people looking over a fence at a sports field. They all had the same size of box to stand on but the smaller people still couldn't see over the fence. Equity is what's important - it's different from equality. [See the picture below, which takes this one step further].

Everyone is different but we all deserve to be treated fairly.

All people are beautiful and special. The idea is to recognize and value each other and treat everyone fairly. This is not always the case in our current world.

How can we organize our life so that different people have an ability to be different but equally valued.

Speed dating

After the ice was broken and we were well and truly warmed up, we went into two rounds of speed dating groups of three or four participants - run by Tina Miedtank - giving us a chance to get to know our fellow swans and their research interests a bit better. Tina gave us a list of useful questions to reflect on (see below). But many groups just had a free-flowing discussion.

  1. Find three common things you all enjoy (e.g., favorite conference or conference location, academic topic, weekend activity, specific food).
  2. Do you share an identity besides being a woman and an academic? (e.g., discipline, migrant, parenting, first-gen scholar). How many shared identities do you have?
  3. What is one small action that has made a big difference in your academic journey? (This could be an act of allyship, mentorship, or a supportive gesture from a colleague).
  4. If you could instantly change one thing about academia (to make it more inclusive), what would it be and why?

Thematic networking

The bulk of the meeting consisted of a set of break-out rooms with thematic networking, facilitated by Emamuzo Idegbesor and Huong Nguyen and based on a short survey of interests that was completed before the meeting.

In these rooms, we were asked to discuss six key topics and share any useful resources for them, a very effective and efficient way of crowd-sourcing relevant information. Hats off to the team!

  1. Top Researchers in Gender & Diversity
  2. Grant Opportunities
  3. Key Conferences
  4. Key Research Centres
  5. Publication Outlets (Academic & Industry)
  6. Helpful Resources

Again though, many of us decided to completely ignore the instructions and have a free-flowing discussion. However, we all agreed that having a list of resources on these topics would be useful, especially for those new to the area. So after the meeting, we decided to collate these materials in another way and circulated them to participants. 

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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Wed 21 May 2025 07:28

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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