We are engaged in a wide variety of research collaborations across organisations, industry and government.
Our research is funded by national competitive grants, philanthropic gifts and client-commissioned research partnerships with industry and government.
We recognise the value of engaging across a range of partnerships to develop precise and actionable insights tailored for different types of workers, occupations, industries, and demographic groups, to support responses to gender equality at scale.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, 2025-2028
Resistance to gender equality in the Australian construction sector . This project aims to investigate policy failure of gender equality initiatives and specifically, how institutional and individual resistance to gender equality is applied and adapted over time and across different contexts in construction, Australia’s most male dominated sector. This project expects to generate new knowledge for policy authors in government and business, helping them deliver robust policy outcomes to shift gender equality in male dominated sectors. This project should provide significant social and economic benefits to Australia, enabling greater attraction and retention of women to construction jobs, reducing the sectors critical skills shortage.
ARC Mid-Career Fellowship, 2024-2027
This project aims to investigate the replacement care arrangements that will support different groups of informal carers of a person with a disability, chronic illness or older relative to participate in paid work in contemporary Australia. Using mixed methods, field trials, and an innovative conceptual approach focused on time synchronicity, it will generate critical new knowledge about the characteristics and effectiveness of sustainable replacement care models that enable carers to enter or increase paid work and maintain work/care balance. Significant benefits include improving aged, disability and carer service models and policies to enhance women’s workforce participation, boost national productivity, and improve carer wellbeing.
ARC Future Fellowship, 2022-2026
This project investigates gender segregation, which is a remarkably resilient problem in the Australian labour market, despite women's increasing labour force participation and strong educational attainment. It examines this problem with a focus on women’s careers in very male-dominated occupations. In these contexts, women enter in low numbers, find it difficult to progress, and face extremely hostile working environments. Adopting a career stage, a worker- and industry-engaged, and a comparative design, the project will generate new insight into where and how sustainable careers for women are challenged in these contexts. This knowledge will inform strategies to build gender equality in jobs at the heart of the economy. Project ID: FT210100356.
ARC Discovery Project, 2022-2025
This project aims to investigate how and why parents and grandparents share childcare responsibilities in contemporary Australia. Using mixed methods and an innovative conceptual approach with a central focus on parent-grandparent care dyads, it expects to generate critical new knowledge of intra-family negotiations about employment and childcare provision across generations, and their relationship with social and economic policy. The project expects to identify sustainable employment-childcare practices that meet the needs of children, parents and grandparents. Significant benefits include informing new policies aimed to enhance both gender and generational equity, promote women’s workforce participation, and boost national productivity.
ARC Discovery Project, 2022-2024
This project examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis on the working futures of young women and men in three advanced market economies where the pandemic hit with varying degrees of severity. Young people have experienced the greatest upheaval of all workers, and the impact has been gendered. Recovery strategies will have lasting consequences for women’s and men’s working futures. The project will produce macro-level mapping of post-pandemic national work/care regimes, and micro-level survey data on young people’s experience of and attitudes to the future of work in Australia, the UK and Japan, to deliver insights on the gendered economic and social impact of the pandemic and inform a more inclusive global recovery. Project ID: DP220100657.
Linkage Project, 2026–2027
This project aims to examine how early-career experiences shape workers’ career intentions in frontline occupations. Poor working conditions, including excessive workloads, underpayment, and harassment, reinforce gendered employment patterns and contribute to persistent labour shortages that undermine Australia's economic productivity and growth. Studying four occupations with distinct gender compositions, this project provides novel insights into how entry-level conditions influence career retention, progression and gendered labour-market segmentation. Benefits include evidence-based strategies to guide policy and practice to improve job quality and safety in frontline occupations, reducing turnover and strengthening workforce sustainability.
ARC Linkage Project, 2020-2024
This project investigates how women and men understand and experience the changing nature of work and their hopes and fears for the future. It aims to generate new knowledge about the gendered dimensions of workplace change using an innovative and engaged research design that focuses on retail and the law, two areas where women are increasingly dominant, but which are located at distinct ends of the labour market. Outcomes include an enhanced and coordinated capacity to build gender equality into the future of work. This should provide significant benefits such as better living standards for individuals and families and improved profitability and productivity for businesses. Project ID: LP190100966.
Australian Government, Office for Women, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2025-2030
This five-year Research Partnership aims to build the evidence base to activate the Australian Government’s national strategy for gender equality, Working for Women: A Strategy for Gender Equality. Along with a team of interdisciplinary researchers, the innovative collaborative project informs targeted government action through engagement across universities, industry, unions and the community sector to deliver data-driven actionable insights towards a more gender-equal economy.
Electrical Trades Union, 2025-2028
The project aims to create better entry pathways and careers for women in electrical trades.
ANROWS Sexual Harassment Research Program, 2022-2024
This project investigates how employees and managers in the Australian retail sector understand, experience, and manage sexual harassment at work. This research informs targeted actions to address and prevent sexual harassment in retail workplaces through collaboration with key sector stakeholders.
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Digit Fellowship, 2024
This research project seeks to bridge an important gap in our knowledge about the capability of managers to lead complex issues which are core to the future of work. It aims to better understand how this impacts the work of managers, and to foreground how manager capability shapes team members’ work experiences and workplace dynamics.
Investment NSW Boosting Business Innovation Program, 2023-2023
This project is proudly funded by the NSW Government.
This collaborative research project provides research insights to inform action, advocacy and investment in women’s labour force participation on the Central Coast. It identifies key barriers and interventions among women not participating in the workforce, provides qualitative insights into barriers and enablers, and makes key recommendations to improve women’s economic opportunities and productivity in the Central Coast City.
JMI Policy Challenge Grant, 2022-2023
This project translates an extensive body of established research into new, evidence-based principles to support the NSW Government in building a gender-equal future of work. It aims to provide evidence to integrate gender equality into recovery policies and long-term economic planning and develop innovative gender-responsive policymaking that will boost productivity, economic growth, and the well-being of all people in NSW.
The University of Sydney Nano Institute Kickstarter grant, 2023-2024
This project investigates ways to build an equitable and inclusive quantum workforce and explores the labour force dynamics that shape the gendered structure and profile of the quantum workforce.
Australian Government, Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, 2025-2028
The project evaluates how the program is progressing structural and cultural change in key male-dominated industries and sectors across construction, clean energy, digital technology and advanced manufacturing.
Women in Construction Industry Innovation Program Grant, NSW Government, 2024-2025
This project will research the lived experience of women transitioning in and out of parental leave, using the research to build a parental leave toolkit to promote the retention of women during this time. Once complete, the toolkit will be shared throughout the sector.
Nurses and Midwives' Association, 2025
This project explores the experiences, attitudes and aspirations of NSWNMA members regarding shift work and rostering, emphasizing employee perspectives. The findings will equip the union with evidence to shape strategies on working hours, rostering and member well-being.
The Minderoo Foundation, 2025-2026
This research grant supports activities that map the ecosystem that shapes fathers’ decisions about their involvement in caring for babies during the first 12 months.
Hewett Family Endowment (Women in Super), 2024-2026
This project investigates how ‘adequacy’ is understood in relation to retirement savings, and how the application of a gender lens on ‘adequacy’ might change industry assumptions and approaches. The grant is given in honour of Helen Hewett AM for her advocacy for equity in women’s superannuation and leadership as a founding member of Women in Super.
Kristy Chong OAM, 2024
This grant supports the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work's research pillar on work and care.
