This article introduces the first of two international Themed Collections on gender and work, published as, Part A across Volumes 35(4) and 36(2), and as Part B in Volume 36(3) of The Economic and Labour Relations Review. In introducing the 11 Part A articles, we identify three main themes: contexts, impacts, and effects on gender status. Contexts include climate crisis, uncertain gender impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), and ongoing skill under-recognition in feminised ‘ancillary’ occupations. Impacts include increasing care load and violence in traditionally feminised teaching work, LGBTQ+ workers’ intertwined experiences of stigmatisation and job insecurity, and immigrant experience of unregulated care work in private households. Impacts on well-being, safety, and security include restricted access to nutrition, rest, creativity, life cycle, and community participation, and diminished status, agency, voice, and recognition of productivity contribution. An alternative productivity calculus is provided in articles documenting the benefits of Australia’s universal statutory 10 days’ family and domestic violence leave entitlement, a proposed Indian green jobs guarantee programme that could transition millions of women into the formal labour market, and an Australian calculation of the unrecognised GDP contribution of breastmilk. A Sub-Saharan African article shows that legally mandated maternity protections are inaccessible to women in informal labour markets. In the context of the United Nations’ key normative and programme role, and its stocktakes of equality and empowerment milestones, we foreshadow questions of official structure and grassroots agency to be addressed in the Part B exploration in (Volume 36(3)) of informal economy work, community agency, and intersectional voice.

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.

Government procurement is a highly important area to explore in seeking to advance the capacity of enterprises to achieve green technological innovation and promote green development more broadly. Research for this article focused on A-share listed manufacturing enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen as samples, and used the government procurement contract data published by the China Government Procurement Network to explore the effect on technological innovation in the manufacturing industry. The results show that government procurement has a significant and positive effect on green technology innovation. Moreover, the larger the scale of government procurement, the more obvious is the promotion effect on green innovation. A mechanism test found that government procurement can promote corporate green technology innovation by raising awareness of climate change (especially in the eastern regions of China), while a heterogeneity analysis found that government procurement promotes green invention patents more significantly than green utility model patents. Government procurement was also found to have a greater effect on enterprises without ISO14001 certification. Further analysis revealed that overall demand-side innovation procurement and supply-side innovation subsidies have a mutually reinforcing synergistic effect on firm innovation. While government synergies vary significantly depending on the policy implementation sequence, this article provides an important reference in identifying further ways to improve government procurement policies.

A common feature of public policy in Australia in recent decades has been use of wage caps to restrain public sector wage growth. In this paper we explore the nature of the relationship between wage growth in public and private sectors, and thereby whether wage caps have also influenced private sector wage growth. Despite the differences in wage setting institutions and mechanisms, analysis presented reveals that private and public sector wage growth are closely entwined at the aggregate level for Australia, and in all states and territories. Naïve Vector Error Correction Models identify the private sector as the long run wage leader for Australia and half the states and territories. However, after controlling for a structural break occurring during the COVID-19 era, our results indicate that joint or bi-directional wage leadership between both sectors is the norm. Findings suggest that wage caps implemented after the GFC to suppress public sector wage growth likely spilled over to the private sector, contributing to widespread wage stagnation experienced throughout the 2010s. More recently, these public sector wage caps stifled the ability of public sector wages to adjust to rapid private sector wage growth. These findings have important policy implications for public sector wage policy as a key contributor to governments’ labour market and macroeconomic management.

The offshoring-fuelled growth of the Central and Eastern European business services sector gave rise to shared service centres (SSCs) – quasi-autonomous entities providing routine-intensive tasks for the central organisation. The advent of technologies such as intelligent process automation, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence jeopardises SSCs’ employment model, necessitating workers’ skills adaptation. The study challenges the deskilling hypothesis and reveals that automation in the Polish SSCs is conducive to upskilling and worker autonomy. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, we highlight the negotiated nature of automation processes shaped by interactions between headquarters, SSCs, and their workers. Workers actively participated in automation processes, eliminating the most mundane tasks. This resulted in upskilling, higher job satisfaction, and empowerment. Yet, this phenomenon heavily depends upon the fact that automation is triggered by labour shortages, which limit the expansion of SSCs. This situation encourages companies to leverage the specific expertise entrenched in their existing workforce. The study underscores the importance of fostering employee-driven automation and upskilling initiatives for overall job satisfaction and quality.

The endogenous money approach has a long history and development, but the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory point out that it can be extended by Chartalism and the leading role it gives to money created by the State. In this paper, we test this assertion by making a critical analysis of their contributions and reviewing the opposing positions. We conclude that, indeed, the integration of the endogenous money and state money views in a same theorical framework seems to offer a coherent explanation of monetary phenomena.