I am a third-year student from London, England majoring in Political Science and double minoring, in French as a Second Language and Latin-American and Caribbean Studies. After graduation, I hope to work in policy development and political strategy in the UK. I am very grateful to the Dean of Arts Development Fund for fundng the internship opportunity at the Fawcett Society this summer, 2025.
Having previously worked for a Member of Parliament, I was keen to work in the charity sector to understand how non-partisan political organisations influence policy. I also wanted to gain expertise in a specific policy area. Feminism is an area in which I have maintained interest since running the Feminism Society at my school, so working for the Fawcett Society was the perfect opportunity for me.
The Fawcett Society is a charity that campaigns for gender equality in the UK. Their three areas of concentration are workplaces (including parental leave and the gender pay gap), public services and Artificial Intelligence.
I completed two main projects during this internship. Firstly, I produced a research report exploring the issues related to AI and its impact on women, including bias, the AI workforce, healthcare, deepfakes, social media algorithms and AI companion apps, and mapping out the current state of AI regulation. Fawcett Society will use this report to determine the angle from which they will tackle this wide-ranging and complex topic. Secondly, the organization is partnering with the Royal Institute of British Architects to write a report on gender inequality in the architecture workforce. I produced a comparative analysis of regulators and membership bodies in various professions, examining how they tackle issues of inequality in their sector with the goal of producing recommendations for RIBA and the Architects Registration Board.\
The main skill from my academic background which helped me in this internship was the ability to conduct thorough research. For the AI report, for example, I had to read technical documents and extract the elements that were relevant to Fawcett鈥檚 work. I also had to navigate complicated pieces of legislation to understand the current legal framework regulating AI. The research skills that I have obtained during my degree were essential for this process.
One of my favourite parts of the internship was attending an event put on by the Fabian Society for the launch of their pamphlet 鈥淎 rights-based approach to ending violence against women in the UK.鈥� The idea behind their strategy is that starting with a rights-based approach, i.e. that women and girls have an inalienable right to life, education, freedom from torture and so on, forces governments to take preventative action against violence, rather than the criminal-justice-based reactive approach that is currently the norm. As well as enjoying the discussion, I found it interesting to see the dynamics between the various organisations involved in the strategy, including the Fabian Society, the End Violence Against Women Coalition and Labour Party MPs, who all share a common goal but have different methods for achieving it.
One challenge I encountered was that working from home meant that I did not get a good sense about the work being done by staff outside my department and therefore how the charity functioned as a whole. I overcame this challenge by reaching out online to various members of staff who I had not yet met, introducing myself and asking what I could do to help. This meant that I learned about the work of other departments.
Thank you again to the donors of the Dean of Arts Development Fund for making this valuable experience possible!
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