The global Information Technology (IT) sector is characterised by low participation of women and the UK is no exception. In response, UK organizations (e.g. Women in Technology), committees (e.g. BCS Women) and campaigns (e.g. Computer Clubs for Girls) have been set up to address the problem and increase the small and falling number of women in IT education, training and employment. To complement and provide an evidence base for future interventions this project will adopt a new approach, differentiated from existing research by considering the problem from two unexplored angles simultaneously. First, India, in comparison with most OECD countries, has a much higher proportion of women working as IT specialists; the project will compare the experiences of IT workers in India and the UK to see what the UK can learn from the Indian case. Secondly, the research will explore the insights of migrant women and men who move between UK and India and have experience of both work cultures in order to obtain new insights into gender norms in each country as well as best practice. Through this multidisciplinary, comparative analysis across the two countries, and of the experiences of migrants, 2 significant but separate fields of academic research will be brought together: 1) gender issues in IT, and 2) gender and skilled migration. The questions the research seeks to answer are: a) What are the patterns of gender differences in the labour market among migrant and non-migrant workers in the IT sector in India and the UK? This aims to identify differences in occupational roles, wages, and whether size of firms or other demographic variables matter; b) What processes have led to different gendered patterns of workplace experiences among migrant and non-migrant workers in the IT sector in India and the UK? This question's comparative approach will address a specific knowledge gap by exploring the perspectives of men as well as women, migrants as well as non-migrants, in both countries; c) is oriented around the concerns of businesses and policy-makers and asks, what is the role of firms, industry and national regulations and cultures in creating barriers and opportunities for migrant and non-migrant men and women's career entry and progression and labour markets? The answers will be sought from HR managers and policy makers in both countries; d) acknowledges that many firms are already trying to develop organisational cultures and career pathways to address the gender disparity in the IT sector; it asks, what are the best practices for integrating women into firms in each country and how does this differ by migration status? This question involves exploring the experiences of migrant men as well as migrant and non-migrant women, and establishes mechanisms for sharing best practice between firms and between the two countries. To ensure the research is timely, relevant and will generate useful information, it was developed through conversations with the Indian and UK IT sectors' key professional and trade associations, chartered bodies, IT education campaigners and advocates, and multinational IT companies. During the project, individual representatives from 5 of these organizations - a Professional Advisory Group (PAG) - will meet regularly with the researchers, to discuss the findings and offer advice. The IT companies will facilitate the research by introducing the researchers to voluntary cohorts of men and women IT employees in each country. Because of the urgency of the issue the firms and PAG have asked for 3 best practice guides during the project. At the end of the project, the researchers will produce a targeted report for the PAG organisations and for firms. Through the PAG, this report will be disseminated to their corporate memberships, numbering in the thousands, and to UK and Indian policy makers through focused workshops. Other users of the research include the OECD and IOM with which the researchers have links.

National infrastructure provides essential services to a modern economy: energy, transport, digital communications, water supply, flood protection, and waste water / solid waste collection, treatment and disposal. The OECD estimates that globally US$53 trillion of infrastructure investment will be needed by 2030. The UK's National Infrastructure Plan set out over £460 billion of investment in the next decade, but is not yet known what effect that investment will have on the quality and reliability of national infrastructure services, the size of the economy, the resilience of society or its impacts upon the environment. Such a gap in knowledge exists because of the sheer complexity of infrastructure networks and their interactions with people and the environment. That means that there is too much guesswork, and too many untested assumptions in the planning, appraisal and design of infrastructure, from European energy networks to local drainage systems. Our vision is for infrastructure decisions to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision makers will have access to, and visualisation of, information that tells them how all infrastructure systems are performing. They will have models that help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. They will be able to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and explore the effects of future uncertainties, such as population growth, new technologies and climate change. The UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) is a consortium of seven UK universities, led by the University of Oxford, which has developed unique capability in infrastructure systems analysis, modelling and decision making. Thanks to an EPSRC Programme Grant (2011-2015) the ITRC has developed and demonstrated the world's first family of national infrastructure system models (NISMOD) for analysis and long-term planning of interdependent infrastructure systems. The research is already being used by utility companies, engineering consultants, the Institution of Civil Engineers and many parts of the UK government, to analyse risks and inform billions of pounds worth of better infrastructure decisions. Infrastructure UK is now using NISMOD to analyse the National Infrastructure Plan. The aim of MISTRAL is to develop and demonstrate a highly integrated analytics capability to inform strategic infrastructure decision making across scales, from local to global. MISTRAL will thereby radically extend infrastructure systems analysis capability: - Downscale: from ITRC's pioneering representation of national networks to the UK's 25.7 million households and 5.2 million businesses, representing the infrastructure services they demand and the multi-scale networks through which these services are delivered. - Upscale: from the national perspective to incorporate global interconnections via telecommunications, transport and energy networks. - Across-scale: to other national settings outside the UK, where infrastructure needs are greatest and where systems analysis represents a huge business opportunity for UK engineering firms. These research challenges urgently need to be tackled because infrastructure systems are interconnected across scales and prolific technological innovation is now occurring that will exploit, or may threaten, that interconnectedness. MISTRAL will push the frontiers of system research in order to quantify these opportunities and risks, providing the evidence needed to plan, invest in and design modern, sustainable and resilient infrastructure services. Five years ago, proposing theory, methodology and network models that stretched from the household to the globe, and from the UK to different national contexts would not have been credible. Now the opportunity for multi-scale modelling is coming into sight, and ITRC, perhaps uniquely, has the capacity and ambition to take on that challenge in the MISTRAL programme.