The incorporation of technology, and more recently AI [Artificial Intelligence], into our everyday lives has been progressing at an unprecedented pace. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and various other digital assistants and chatbots populate our everyday interactions for most service-related matters. Acknowledging that technology, work, and social relations are deeply entangled with each other, this paper combines a literature review of anthropomorphisation of AI and emerging technology with a focus on gender and work, and empirical examples drawn from real-world applications and chatbots in the service industry in India, to critically analyse the gendering of technology. We unpack the tendency to ascribe a feminine identity to assistive technology and argue that gendering of emergent assistive technology is performative and relational. It materialises through particularistic manifestations drawing from the sociocultural context. Furthermore, this gendering of technology is co-constituted by the sexual division of labour and gendered norms of work.

This article examines the agency of women in a state programme which, although its original aim was not focused on improving the situation of women, has had the effect of helping women from poor sectors along a gender path. The analysis uses the concept of agency to explore contradictions between gender roles, the sexual division of labour, and women’s emancipation. While the programme reinforced some traditional gender roles, it also enabled women to develop a certain level of autonomy through emancipatory strategies, such as creating new spaces where they can discuss gender issues and share their experiences. Key findings relate to the role of community activities in building alternatives to current living conditions. The programme helped women save time and money and provided opportunities to step out of their private spaces. In its final year, the programme came to incorporate a feminist perspective, thanks to the efforts of both the feminist movement and the women beneficiaries of the programme. Analysis of the text of interviews and a final focus group provides an assessment of the programme’s outcomes and allows an evaluation of the level of agency achieved.

In rural India, a large portion of the population continues to struggle with poverty, limited access to resources and education, and few job opportunities. This leads to many individuals, including men, women, and children, having to take on daily wage labouring jobs to make ends meet. Women from marginalised communities often find themselves working in fields, brick kilns, construction sites, small factories, or as domestic workers in higher caste households. Unfortunately, the wages earned from these informal jobs are often insufficient for survival, and these women also face discrimination based on caste, class, religion, and gender in the workplace. This creates an undignified and oppressive environment for these women, particularly when they take on paid domestic work, which is often exploitative and rife with abuse in rural areas.

This paper seeks to explore the intertwined experiences of paid domestic workers in rural India. It is based on primary research conducted through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 domestic workers during and after the pandemic in the Chandauli district of Uttar Pradesh, representing a rural area. The paper contends that domestic work in rural India remains deeply rooted in caste-based servitude. The organisation of paid domestic work in rural India is influenced by a complex interplay of caste, class, gender, and religious identities. There exists not only a division of labour but also a hierarchy of labourers within domestic work. They not only encounter caste discrimination but also perpetuate discrimination against fellow workers ranked lower in the caste hierarchy.

This study examines paid and unpaid childcare distribution connected to gender relations and inequalities. We ask: what are the gender consequences of childcare distribution in Mexico? To answer this enquiry, we apply Razavi’s diamond model, examining the social dimensions of the family/household, the State, the Market, and not-for-profit (NFP) sectors. We utilise national statistics and representative surveys from the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), complemented with published studies on Latin America and Mexico.

The article is structured as follows. First, we provide a literature review on the model related to welfare and care provision. Second, we summarise important aspects of the Mexican context. Our analysis is structured in subsections following each dimension of the diamond. We discuss our findings through a graphic representation of the model applied to Mexico, and conclude with final remarks.

Our concrete application of the model shows how the distribution of – paid and unpaid – childcare has consequences in (re)producing and strengthening gender inequalities in a myriad of spaces, dynamics, and arrangements. Key findings indicate a reduction in public childcare provision, transferring responsibilities to the household and the NFP dimensions, enhancing gendered expectations. Additionally, there is an increased protagonism of market relations within the domestic sphere and unequal conditions for those with resources.

We contribute to current studies on gender inequalities connected to welfare systems – and the lack thereof – by offering conceptual elements to develop research pathways sensitive to context-specificities, closely aligned with countries and societies within the Global South.

The present study examines the influence of non-economic factors on women’s labour market participation in low-income neighbourhoods of urban areas in India. For this purpose, we conducted a survey in two slum areas of Kolkata city in West Bengal – one, located in a residential neighbourhood, and another, situated in the dock area of the city and surrounded by factories. Our survey of 384 ever-married working-age women makes three noteworthy observations. First, the location of slums crucially affects the type of paid work that is available and accessible to women. Secondly, although women’s entry into the labour market maybe crisis-driven, the women workers develop an intrinsic valuation of paid work as their right, and as a means of livelihood in the process. Finally, social and community norms explain both the non-participation and the temporary withdrawal of women from the labour force. Thus, the inability and/or the unwillingness of slum women to participate in the labour market primarily stem from the strict adherence to patriarchal norms in general, and community norms in particular, either imposed on them directly by their spouses or indirectly by the community they reside in. Therefore, our analysis highlights the need for tailor-made policies that meet locality-specific needs.

This paper describes and analyses the ways in which women are disadvantaged in the Australian apprenticeship system. While women make up 47.9% of the Australian workforce, only 28.0% of apprentices and trainees are women.

‘Traditional trade’ apprenticeships are still predominantly undertaken by men. The newer ‘traineeships’, introduced in the 1980s to provide apprenticed training to more occupations and to allow equal access to women, receive less funding and fewer training resources. The paper traces the developments by analysing government reports, participation data by gender in the apprenticeship system, and apprentice/trainee funding rates for the main occupations. The paper also shows how post-COVID developments in the economy have been harnessed to favour male-dominated occupations in the apprenticeship system. The paper argues that the encouragement of women into trade apprenticeships has moved from an ‘equity’ argument to a ‘national interest’ argument, paralleling the conscription of women to fill the gaps left by men during the Second World War.

The discussion shows that the disadvantaged status of women is largely consistent with existing theories on gender and work, but there are some points of departure. The paper argues that more research into traineeships is needed to inform developments. It would provide a voice for feminised occupations and would assist in countering the monopolisation of the debate by masculinised interest groups.

While the data are Australian, the issues potentially apply to all countries which have apprenticeship systems, but have the most relevance for women in countries where male-dominated occupations are privileged in apprenticeship policy.

Globally, gender equality is the next frontier for social transformation, and women’s economic empowerment is promoted as the pathway to achieve this goal, particularly in countries of the Global South. Women’s economic empowerment is broadly defined as women’s capacity to contribute to, and benefit from, economic activities on terms that recognise the value of their contributions. Advocates for women’s economic empowerment state that it has the potential to be a safeguard against poverty and precarity by enhancing women’s wellbeing. Using a critical-feminist lens, we explore the benefits and risks of the global trend towards women’s economic empowerment. After providing an overview of the evolution of the concept of empowerment, we review the benefits of women’s economic empowerment: economic growth, improved rates of tertiary education and market participation for women, and growth of women’s autonomy. We then examine the risks of the global focus on women’s economic empowerment, which we distil into three key areas: (a) women seen as a country’s ‘natural resource’, used as instruments for economic prosperity and reproduction without considering their wellbeing; (b) a focus on women’s market participation without adequately factoring in current labour market realities; and (c) pushing the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward without fully considering the scope of unpaid reproductive work undertaken by women. We conclude with an analysis of how UN Women (2024) is shifting the agenda by providing a holistic framework for thinking about women’s economic empowerment. We suggest that there is room for cautious optimism if this framework is widely adopted.

The social organisation of productive and reproductive labour leaves women disproportionately vulnerable to climatic changes and extreme weather events. In the Indian context, this could further reduce women’s labour force participation rates from levels that are already relatively low. Employment opportunities for women in the clean energy sector have been noted to create transformative changes in their lives only with policies such as government intervention to provide accessible public services. Towards this end, I propose a gendered and green job guarantee programme directed towards education, health, public transport (or universal basic services), climate mitigation, and climate adaptation activities.

The intersections between gendered livelihoods and the climate crisis, as well as the gendered and environmental implications of the existing rural employment guarantee in India, are reviewed. Gender-disaggregated employment creation through the proposed job guarantee programme and the budgetary implications are estimated, along with suggestions for potential sources of financing. The programme is estimated to result in the creation of 36 million guaranteed jobs, which accounts for 6% of the workforce as of 2023. Of these jobs, women’s employment opportunities constitute 11.6 million. The number of guaranteed jobs created for women accounts for 4% of the rural female workforce and 11.6% of the urban female workforce. Thus, a gendered and green job guarantee programme in India could be an effective form of government intervention to address the interlinked issues of women’s work and climate action in India.

Over the past half-century, there have been significant advances towards workplace gender equality. However, Australia’s working women continue to earn less than men. A key reason is that occupational segregation has maintained very high levels of feminisation in frontline care and other occupations, including in many ‘ancillary’ or supportive roles, which employ large numbers of women and where skills may not be readily recognised and valued. This article explores the way one set of highly segregated ancillary occupations, receptionists, are vulnerable to gender-based undervaluation and argues that this group warrants further attention in strategies to promote workplace gender equality. First, the article outlines the legislative changes, which have recast regulatory attention to low pay and undervaluation in highly feminised occupations and industries, then draws on Australian Bureau of Statistics data to show the presence of several ancillary occupations among Australia’s most feminised. The article then narrows to examine health care reception and reviews the small body of literature that explores the complex, invisible skills this work involves. The example of health care reception underlines the need for gender equality strategies that challenge constructions of women’s jobs as peripheral and subordinate to male-dominated roles, and which recognise and make visible the skills and contributions that women make in a fuller range of feminised occupations.

Despite societal shifts in attitudes towards gender and sexuality, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to experience multiple forms of labour-market disadvantage – including greater unemployment, lower job satisfaction, and slower career progression. However, existing scholarship has paid little attention to the comparative employment conditions of LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals. Leveraging unique data from a large, Australian, employer-employee dataset (2024 AWEI Employee Survey), we fill this knowledge gap by examining the relationships between LGBTQ+ status, non-standard employment (NSE), and workplace well-being. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we provide novel empirical evidence of the ‘double whammy’ faced by LGBTQ+ employees in relation to NSE. On the one hand, LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to be in certain forms of NSE than non-LGBTQ+ employees; on the other, their workplace well-being is more negatively impacted by these employment arrangements. These findings bear important lessons for policy and practice, indicating that closing the gap between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ workers requires careful consideration of their employment arrangements and the circumstances that surround them.

Organisational measures to support employees who are experiencing family and domestic violence (FDV) are increasingly seen as an important policy response to mitigate the consequences of such violence and promote gender equality. However, little is known about the costs to employers of providing such workplace policies. This paper assesses the costs and benefits to Australian employers of providing 10 days of paid FDV leave to employees experiencing such violence. We draw on a case study based on the evidence presented to the Fair Work Commission which contributed to their 2023 enactment that modern award wages should include 10 days of paid FDV leave. Using a bottom-up approach and utilising individual-level data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, our estimates reveal that the total annual cost to employers of providing an entitlement of 10 days of paid FDV leave to award-covered employees is between $13.1 million and $34.3 million. Our analysis highlights the role of robust economic analysis in generating evidence for policy change and offers an approach that can be applied in evaluating costs and benefits of other employer initiatives of similar nature.

Notwithstanding their increased participation in the labour market, women across the world continue to bear family care responsibilities disproportionately, and, consequently, often find it difficult to balance effectively their dual roles as workers and caregivers. This is particularly the case for women working in the informal economy. Too often they have limited or no access to maternity protection. This situation is a potential barrier to the achievement of, among others, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 5 and 8, specifically target 5.c which calls for the adoption and strengthening of policies and legislation to promote gender equality as well as targets 8.5 (achievement of full and productive employment and decent work for all) and 8.8 (protection of labour rights and promotion of secure working environments for all workers, including those in precarious employment). Thus, as this Themed Collection posits, it is crucial to get a deeper understanding of obstacles to gender equality in the labour market, and the extent to which these are effectively addressed. This paper draws largely on qualitative data from recent (2022) case studies of three countries in sub-Saharan Africa—the region with the highest proportion of women working in this economy— in order to highlight some of the structural barriers to maternity protection for women in the informal economy. Particular focus is on legislative and institutional frameworks, workers’ union membership, and the financing of maternity protection. Strategic recommendations for achieving both gender equality and decent work through improved access to maternity protection conclude the paper.

This article considers how the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a remarkable social experiment in the market for migrant ‘au pair’ labour in Australia. As has been illustrated in broader accounts of the pandemic’s ‘care crisis’, the global health emergency cracked open underlying fault lines, as capacities for social reproduction were stretched to breaking point. At the same time, the pandemic deepened the precarity of temporary migrants as they lost jobs and incomes, experienced housing insecurity, and were excluded from state emergency relief measures. Building on interdisciplinary feminist literatures on gender, work, migration, and social reproduction, this article adds to emerging scholarship on the growing phenomenon of au pairing in Australia to examine drivers of demand, migrant mobilities in and out of au pair labour, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the market. While au pairing emerged during the pandemic as a form of survival work where migrants had little negotiating power, the market ultimately shifted when emergency childcare measures were withdrawn, migrant labour became scarce, and visa restrictions on working hours were relaxed. In addition to providing new empirical insights into au pairing in Australia, the findings underscore the constitutive role of law and policy settings in shaping the distributions and divisions of reproductive labour, which can both consolidate and also challenge broader gendered care norms and distributions and the social reproduction bargain.

Since the early 1950s, national statisticians have regarded unpaid work as non-economic, excluding it from GDP. Feminist scholars argue this exclusion reflects a gender-biased view of progress that renders women’s non-market productivity invisible. As what gets measured drives policy priorities and resource allocation, breastfeeding highlights the need to account for women’s unpaid care work in economic statistics. This paper advances the Beyond GDP agenda by demonstrating how market-derived prices can improve the measurement and recognition of women’s lactation labour. We first trace the historical displacement of breastfeeding by commercial formula and identify key economic drivers. Next, we review critiques of GDP and debates over including non-market household services in the UN’s System of National Accounts. We then present novel estimates of breast milk’s economic value in selected countries. Our analysis shows that existing market prices can robustly proxy for breastfeeding work, correcting GDP’s gender bias and realigning policy priorities. Including human milk production in core economic indicators not only reflects its true contribution but also promotes women’s and children’s rights and supports sustainable development through comprehensive true-cost accounting.

This study is based on four focus group interviews with public school teachers in Massachusetts about reducing work hours as a means of improving their working conditions. Our analysis documents a common experience of overwork, expressed in the focus groups and measured by time-use diaries. Teachers reported long work hours and a significant ‘mental load’—both of which affect teachers’ quality of life, physical and mental health, relationships with their families and desire to keep teaching. While participants were union members and therefore experienced with collective bargaining, most approached the issue of overwork as an individual problem that must be solved by setting and maintaining personal boundaries. Focus group participants differed in their assessment of a hypothetical policy proposal for a work-time reduction without a loss of pay for teachers or instructional time for students. While generally supportive of the goal, participants questioned whether contractual reductions would correspond to actual reductions in hours worked. Teachers expressed both eagerness to include work-time reductions in future contracts, as well as scepticism that their districts had the fiscal space or political will to achieve this goal. Discussions revealed that teachers’ professional identities as hard-working and caring ‘perfectionists’ who are responsible for their students’ learning, inhibited their policy imaginations with regard to using collective bargaining to win them additional leisure time.

While gender-based violence (GBV) is increasingly recognised as a significant social and political issue, its impact on women educators remains underexamined. In the context of growing concerns about violence against educators and the prevalence of GBV in educational institutions, this study investigates gendered patterns of violence against school leaders in Australian schools. Drawing on 18,172 observations from reports by principals and deputy principals, this analysis explores incidents of bullying, threats of violence, and physical violence to identify disparities in the experiences of men and women school leaders. The analysis determined that women school leaders were more likely to experience threats of violence and bullying at work than their male counterparts. Logistic regression analyses revealed that gender, school sector, and role significantly influence the likelihood of experiencing various forms of workplace violence, with women in secondary schools and those in government or Catholic sectors being particularly vulnerable.

Much has been made about the impact of new technologies on the organisation of work in the professions. However, the gendered effect of technological change has rarely been a focus of investigation, even though these transformations are occurring in a context of persistent and pervasive gendered inequality. This paper aims to address this gap, using the case of the legal profession to understand the gendered impact of technological change. Drawing on insights developed through interviews with 33 senior legal stakeholders, the paper finds that technological change plays out in contradictory ways, offering both promise and peril for gender equality within the legal profession. We identify four key concepts – bifurcation, democratisation, humanisation, and flexibilisation – to elucidate the intricate interplay between technology and gendered legal careers, acknowledging the dual potential that technology holds for advancement and adversity. We argue for proactive measures and strategies to be adopted by legal institutions, professional associations, and employers, to harness the benefits of new technologies while mitigating the very real risks such technologies pose to a more gender-equitable future of work.