Research grants

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This project is proudly funded by the NSW Government. 

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.

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.