Purpose

The purpose of this call for papers is to assemble a stock take, assessing progress towards gender equality in work, paid and unpaid, formal and informal. Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 8, formulated pre-COVID as part of a program for the decade 2020-2030, identify gender equality as a 'necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world'. They call for steps towards women's and girls' empowerment through 'inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all'. Yet four years into the decade, the world confronts ongoing pandemic threats, a need of ever-increasing urgency to forestall climate catastrophe, and devastating human rights consequences of new wars, political repression and forced migration. Neoliberalisation, as a variegated and still-ascendant global project, is deeply gendered. Developments in AI have emerging implications for gendered work and policy formation. Claudia Goldin's 2023 Nobel Economics prize, awarded for her North American-centred long-term historical analysis, emphasises the entrenched role of maternity in the informal economy. Is there room for hope? How are obstacles to gender equality in work being confronted, and how effectively?

Focus

We call for articles with a theoretical, policy or empirical focus that provide any one of the following: 

• a comprehensive and systematic analysis of specific issue of gender and work, reviewing key texts and drawing out new conceptual frameworks or policy directions;
• a critical case study or evaluation of a gender and work initiative, drawing out its implications for policy and practice;
• new empirical evidence relating to an aspect of one of the topics below (noting that detailed technical or methodological exposition should be presented in supplementary files).

Scope of the collection

A non-exhaustive list of possible topics includes:

1. Gender and decent work: taking stock mid-way through the Sustainable Development decade
2. Working from home: Care and careers; locality, safety and the right to disconnect
3. Gender and sustainability: climate change and gendered working lives
4. Rebuilding disrupted lives: gendered livelihoods in the wake of political unheaval
5. Gender, indigeneity and work: voice and sovereignty
6. Gender, migration, refugee status and work
7. Gender segregation and gender pay equality
8. Care work, value and the concept of productivity
9. Fluid gender identities and workplace experiences
10. Sexualities and work
11. Addressing gender-based harassment at work
12. Neoliberalisation and gender
13. Regulatory change: gender, work and labour relations
14. Gender, skill and flexible work
15. Gender aspects of occupational health and safety
16. Evaluation of trade union gender initiatives
17. Gender, work and family - evaluation of government policies of organisational approached
18. Gender, technology and the future of work
19. AI and gender equity
20. Education, training and the empowerment of girls and women
21. Gender, work and ageing
22. The Australian Working Future Agenda - The Women's Economic Equality Ten-Year Plan
23. Claudia Goldin's historical explanation of the gender workforce participation and pay gaps

Submission process and deadlines

Potential authors are encouraged to consult the guest editors early in the planning stage, and to submit provisional abstracts to them by 15 May for initial feedback. A mid-year Zoom workshop is planned for authors whose proposed papers that appear to fit well into the Themed Collection.

GUEST EDITORS - Yuvisthi Naidoo ynaidoo@unsw.edu.au; Anne Junor a.junor@unsw.edu.au; Tanya Carney t.carney@unsw.edu.au

ELRR will publish articles relevant to this theme individually in FirstView as they are finalised, and will draw together a significant, diverse and representative collection of contributions for publication in a Themed Collection to be included in the June 2025 Issue, 36(2).

The final submission date for inclusion in the June 2025 collection is 1 November 2024.

Submissions should be within the journal's scope and conform to the journal's house style and formatting requirements. Please see: 

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review
• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review/information/author-instructions

When your draft is ready for peer review it should be uploaded to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/elrr

All papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed, including more exploratory, or conceptual papers suitable for the Contested Terrains section.

Guest Editors

Yuvisthi Naidoo is an expert on the measurement and understanding of living standards. Her research program has direct policy relevance to improving the lives of socially and economically disadvantaged people. As an experienced mixed-method researcher, Yuvisthi's projects have provided an evidence-base across a broad range of critical social policy issues, including: poverty and inequality; deprivation and social exclusion; and costs of living and well-being. Applying these research foci across the life course, Yuvisthi has published on ageing societies, social security recipients, gender equity and the status of children and families.

Anne Junor's research focuses on the recognition and valuing of invisible service skills. Being the lead author of a research-based tool for identifying such skills, she has provided evidence to Australian national and state industrial relations tribunals, helping redress the historical undervaluation of work in gendered occupations (social and community services, school administrative/learning support work and aged care). Her academic publications are based on this work and on grant-funded collaborative research covering education industry job insecurity, work seen as low-skill, aircraft maintenance outsourcing, and new public management/governance.

Tanya Carney is a scholar of the intersection of maternity and care with paid employment. Her research interests lie in standard and non-standard employment and how contractual structures governing paid work arrangements and renumeration (e.g. working hours, working from home, and job security) shape employment participation, career opportunities and economic outcomes for those with caring responsibilities, mailing women, and also those requiring time for self-care (such as those with disability or experiencing chronic illness).