Gender, work, equality and empowerment: Policies, theories and activations post-Beijing

Abstract How have hopes raised by the UN1995 Beijing plan for global gender equality and empowerment been addressed in policy frameworks, academic theorising, grassroots mobilisation, and women’s everyday experience? To answer this question, the article starts with contextual snapshots, focusing on Australian, Indian, and Latin American/Caribbean examples, to draw out issues of occupational segregation, formal and informal economy work, paid and unpaid work, and migration. Two international approaches to addressing these issues were the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal and its International Labour Organisation (ILO) Decent Work agenda. While intersectional and decolonial theories critique the UN’s weak and depoliticised human rights framework, there seem to be limited alternatives right now to the work being done within this frame and to extend it. Sources of hope lie in recent Latin American and Caribbean gender mobilisations, and an emerging Care Society agenda addressing gender inequities of value, time, and voice in unpaid work. Reviewing the seven new research articles on gender and work in ELRR 36(3), this article shifts from structure to agency, identifying how constraints are reproduced and navigated. In Australia, men’s interventions in apprenticeship training structures helped perpetuate occupational segregation. Three articles document daily experiences of restricted agency or outright oppression in work/family relationships in India, where tradition and neoliberalism intersect. Argentinian communal kitchens have reduced domestic labour time and increased voice, though in Mexico, expanded community childcare provision may not shift the gender division of care.