Pictured above: 1 Prof. Thia Hennessy, 2 Dr Olive McCarthy, 3 Dr Michelle Carr, 4 Ruth Cotter, 5 Prof. Eleanor Doyle, 6 Dr Mary O’Shaughnessy, 7 Dr Patrice Cooper, 8 Jennifer Chadwick, 9 Dr Bernadette Power, 10. Sinead Hackett, 11 Dr Noreen Byrne, 12 Alison O’Connell, 13 Ruth Gibbs, 14 Honor Moore
Today, on International Women’s Day, we celebrate the many empowering women we have at Cork University Business School. Leaders in array of fields and disciplines, female staff, students and alumni of the Business School are at the forefront of projects that are positively impacting on our society. We have many noteworthy achievements from women, right across all the areas of the Business School, who are remarkable ambassadors and key to growing CUBS.
The Business School led by Professor Thia Hennessy is making huge strides toward becoming an accredited business school with a global reach. UCC is an outlier in appointing a woman Business School Dean and Thia is in a small minority internationally of being a female Dean of a Business School.
Cork University Business School is home to several leading female academics. Last November for example, Dr Olive McCarthy and Dr Noreen Byrne’s research assessing the appropriateness of introducing interest rate restrictions on high cost credit in Ireland, re-ignited the debate on capping interest rates for moneylenders, paving the way for the introduction of legislation.
Writing in the Certified Public Accountants’ report “Social Enterprise Report – The Irish and International Landscapes”, Dr Mary O’Shaughnessy’s pioneering research shed a light on the wider impact of social enterprises, and their capacity to bring an entrepreneurial dimension to solving a range of contemporary social and environmental issues.
In economics, Professor Eleanor Doyle’s award-winning article on business clusters, encourages policy makers to re-imagine the concept of clustering, and make every effort to foster an environment where knowledge can be shared to drive growth and innovation.
Dr Bernadette Power’s research into business closures during the recession detailed what types of businesses were most at risk during the recession and suggested that policy makers improve systems and institutional conditions so that businesses have more resources available during a downturn.
Writing in the Irish Times in January, Dr Patrice Cooper leaned on her own experience and expertise to offer an insight how employees can make the transition into management.
Similarly, Dr Michelle Carr described how managers need to reflect and adapt their approaches to performance management to maximise individual and organisational performance.
Funded by the HSE, Ph.D candidate, Ruth Gibbs, is examining alternative forecasting models, which could enable the health service to offset the most damaging effects of a future recession and allow the HSE employ a budgeting strategy that accounts for Ireland’s evolving demographics.
In her role as Chairperson of the Entrepreneurial and Social Society, Quercus Scholar, Jennifer Chadwick, has championed entrepreneurship across campus and assisted three students (two from UCC) to compete at the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards.
The Professional staff of the School headed up by Alison O’Connell are embracing change and the growth of the Business School and actively supporting its development through representation by Sinead Hackett on Governing Body.
CUBS alumni are also making their mark on the international stage. Ruth Cotter, Chief Human Resources Officer and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Investor Relations at AMD, is at the heart of an organisation which has placed an emphasis on bringing more women into its engineering ranks.
Likewise, Honor Moore, a Partner in Deloitte, is passionate about nurturing talent and promoting a positive work environment that allows people achieve their potential.