Navigating the path to gender equality in the workforce: What does the evidence say?
Leonora Risse (28 April 2025)
Abstract
Our collective understanding of the causes and consequences of gender gaps in the workforce, and what works to close them, is growing. Yet, gender gaps persist, and the array of potential policies can be overwhelming to navigate. Resistance to diversity initiatives makes the path to gender equality an even more challenging one.
This presentation maps out a ‘big picture’ framework for navigating the research evidence on what works to close gender gaps in economic outcomes – and what doesn’t. This approach offers a framework to understand how various gender equality initiatives – from paid parental leave and diversity training to pay audits and gender-responsive budgeting – fit into society’s progressive journey to gender equality.
This approach also prompts us to interrogate underlying motives for gender equality, to ask whether we have accurately defined “women’s ‘economic empowerment”, and to discover how an intersectional gender lens means more than simply disaggregating the data. This presentation interweaves these various dimensions, offering wide-reaching applicability to researchers, employers, policymakers and governments.
Dr Leonora Risse is an economist who specialises in gender equality. She is currently appointed as an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Canberra and a Research Fellow with the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia,and serves as an Expert Panel Member on gender pay equity for the Fair Work Commission. She formerly held roles with the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University and the Australian Government Productivity Commission. She is a co-founder and former National Chair of the Women in Economics Network (WEN) in Australia.
Dr Risse’s research focuses on gender gaps in the workplace, including the gender pay gap and women’s under-representation in leadership and decision-making. She engages regularly with governments and organisations on evidence-based policies to close gender gaps and how to apply a ‘gender lens’ to economic analysis and policy design through Gender Responsive Budgeting. Her economic expertise extends to labour economics, disadvantage and wellbeing.
She engages regularly with the media to empower everyday audiences with a greater understanding of economic issues. In 2021 she was named as one of Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy.
Dr Risse holds a PhD in Economics, Bachelor of Economics with Honours, and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland.
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Attendees will be provided with the PowerPoint from the presentation. A transcript of this episode will be added shortly.
Thinking beyond efficiency: Counterintuitive advice for scholarly productivity
Luke Capizzo (20 June 2024)
Abstract
Much of the traditional advice about productivity (across many fields, including academic research) is about maximizing individual efficiency from a short-term perspective. But this overly reductive mindset often leads to a less-than-ideal, potentially isolating daily work environment for scholars, squeezes out time for creativity and open-ended thinking, and ties researchers to some of the least fun and most draining aspects of the work. By contrast, long-term productivity and motivation is tied to nurturing our curiosity, learning, enjoyment, and collective success. In this seminar, based on my experiences as an ECR scholar, research collaborator and mentor to graduate students, I will share my advice for embracing daily inefficiency, coddling our inner writing diva, building complementary research teams, and avoiding trendy and easy paths toward publishing. I will also emphasize the need for a highly strategic focus in certain areas (research audience, conference deadlines, data collection, etc.) in order to make the space for a more holistically enjoyable and reasonably paced schedule that still meets and exceeds the research expectations of our institutions and our fields.
Luke Capizzo (Ph.D., APR) is an assistant professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri (transitioning to Michigan State University in Aug. 2024). A PR researcher, educator, and practitioner, his scholarly interests include public relations and social issues management, applied social impact for public relations: Activism, DEI, dialogue, organizational listening, and sustainability/environmental justice; and public relations pedagogy, profession, and research review scholarship. Broadly, his research examines the potential societal contributions of organizations through the public relations function. His peer-reviewed research has been published in multiple journals including the Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, International Journal of Strategic Communication, and Journal of Public Relations Education. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, and Case Studies in Strategic Communication, and as an associate editor for Journal of Public Relations Education. His research has been funded as an Arthur W. Page Legacy Scholar (2020, 2022, and 2023).
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Crisis Response in Higher Education: how the pandemic challenged university operations and organisations in Australia, the UK and Sweden
Prof. Mats Benner (27 March 2023)
Abstract
Throughout history, universities have been deeply affected by societal developments, war, peace, booms, and busts. Disruption and rupture are characteristic of the university-society relationship, with the pandemic as only the most recent instance in history. Professor Mats Benner will showcase how the pandemic affected universities in Australia, the UK and Sweden, and how governments, university leadership, faculty, staff and students responded. He will highlight the significant differences between the three countries in their approach to the pandemic. The dramatic upheavals of the pandemic years may also provide an opportunity to choose to change things for the better, as universities move towards consciously planning for a different future and explore possible lessons for the future.
Mats Benner is a professor of science policy studies at Lund University and is engaged in studies of research policy formation and implementation, and university policy. He has written on the future of Asian universities and the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic and its influence on university governance and power relations affected by the pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and other broader forces. His recent book Crisis Response in Higher Education: How the Pandemic Challenged University Operations and Organisations explores the impact of Covid-19 on universities, and how students, staff, faculty and academic leaders have adapted to and dealt with the impact of the pandemic.
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Equality at Work? The Albanese Government’s Efforts to Make Workplaces Fairer and Safer for Women
Prof. Andrew Stewart (24 March 2023)
Abstract
Labor’s 2022 election platform promised to help close the gender pay gap and make workplaces safer for women. During the Albanese Government’s first year in office, those objectives have driven major changes to the Fair Work Act, as well as anti-discrimination laws and gender equality reporting for large organisations. Join employment law expert and Centre associate Professor Andrew Stewart as he examines these recent changes to the law, including novel prohibitions on pay secrecy, new paths to pay equity in feminised sectors, and more extensive remedies for sexual harassment at work.
Andrew Stewart is the John Bray Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide, Adjunct Professor with QUT’s Centre for Decent Work & Industry, and a consultant with the national law firm Piper Alderman. A pre-eminent expert on employment law and workplace relations, and the author of Stewart’s Guide to Employment Law, he has decades of experience in advising employers, trade unions and governments at all levels on legal and policy issues. Together with other researchers at the Centre, he has helped design and analyse results from groundbreaking national surveys on unpaid work experience and digital platform work. He has also written extensively on pay equity laws, including as part of research for the Fair Work Commission.
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Flushing out the hidden assumptions in the New South Wales Governments Aboriginal employment policy
Simon Jovanovic (27 July 2022)
Abstract
Since the mid-1970s, the New South Wales public service has afforded Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander people racialised positions in the bureaucracy under the guise of race-based ‘Aboriginal’ employment policies. Ostensibly, these NSW Government Aboriginal employment policies aim to improve the under-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working in government agencies.
This presentation critiques selected Aboriginal employment policy texts of the NSW Government from the 1980s to the present day. It exposes the hidden assumptions, problematic representations and racial categories about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in policy text to understand better how Aboriginal employment is formed, shaped, and reformed in the NSW public service. The presentation uses Bacchi’s (2012) What is the Problem Represented to be? and Fairclough’s (2015) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to uncover and explore the policy discourses at play in the selected Aboriginal employment policy texts.
Simon Jovanovic is a citizen of the Walbunja nation of the far south coast New South Wales, and is a Thought Leader in Aboriginal employment policy research and practice. Simon is of Aboriginal and Serbian heritage. He is presently the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Byamee Institute, an Indigenous owned company specialising in influencing effective employment policy development for government, private enterprise and Indigenous business.Simon has expertise working in Aboriginal affairs and the Indigenous sector with strong business acumen and commercial drive to lead and manage growth and change for the Aboriginal workforce. He is currently a PhD Candidate at Macquarie University, based with the Department of Indigenous Studies, Simon worked in Aboriginal identified positions across the New South Wales Government from 2009 to 2018, providing advice and support for Aboriginal programs and services. Simon has successfully attained undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in Indigenous studies, business management, human resources, adult education, vocational education and training, social sciences, and public sector management. A member of the National Congress of Australia’s First People, Gandangarra Local Aboriginal Land Council, Batemans Bay Local Aboriginal Land Council and Redfern Aboriginal Corporation, Simon is an advocate and ambassador for the economic development and advancement of Australia’s First Peoples.
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A transcript of this presentation is available online.
Talking Decent Work and Industry
Prof. Andrew Stewart with Prof. Robyn Mayes (11 May 2022)
Robyn Mayes, Director of the Centre for Decent Work & Industry (CDWI), chats with Professor Andrew Stewart from the University of Adelaide. Robyn and Andrew discuss employment and industrial relations in Australia in the context of the 2022 Federal Election. Andrew also delivered a seminar on this topic, which you can watch on the CDWI website:
The HDR Game
Prof. Rick Krever with Prof. Robyn Mayes (1 April 2022)
Robyn Mayes, Director of the Centre for Decent Work & Industry (CDWI), chats with Professor Rick Krever from the University of Western Australia. Rick offers some terrific advice for Higher Degree Research (HDR) students with regard to publishing their thesis: