Gender Just Transitions: Cultivating Equality For A Sustainable Economy

Intersectional gendered inequalities in the labour market and economy are pervasive and systemic, linked, inter alia, to the global division of labour, social reproduction, child and elder care, household and intra-household inequalities, labour market inequalities, welfare regimes, the feminization of poverty, and economic policies such as neoliberalism. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis, the fourth industrial revolution and advances in artificial intelligence have added new pressure points and countervailing tendencies in the struggle for economic equality for women.

New conversations about more just, redistributive and/or sustainable economies in global, national and local contexts often use the language of ‘transition’, as a movement away from a problematic past to a different, more hopeful, future whether in the context of climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic or, generally, towards a more just future.

Whether and how these transitions take place, the place of women within them, and the degree of economic equality that is possible, are matters of considerable debate and ideological difference. How this plays out matters. Unless women and all disadvantaged groups are centred in processes of transition, we risk moving from old, unjust economies to new, but still unjust, ones. In this project, we are interested in developing the idea of a ‘gender just transition’ to (i) interrogate the old and new barriers to more gender just labour markets and economies across different areas of law, policy, and practice, and (ii) to identify whether and how norms, policies and laws relating to gender equality and women’s rights might aid transitions to greater economic equality and justice. We aim to do so across different scales (global, national, local), areas of law and policy (labour, social welfare, equality, development and human rights) and geographic areas.

This workshop brings together papers that interrogate these questions from a number of perspectives: conceptual and theoretical, international and national policy frameworks, labour market policy and labour law, climate crisis, social policy and the welfare state, positive measures and discrimination law. Participants have been recruited from the Global South and the Global North with the goal of challenging dominant development narratives. Our aim in the workshop is to provide critical reflection on each paper and to hone the core themes of our project: gender just transitions, economic equality for all, the place of law in achieving these, and strategies to do so.