Research

Members of the Fay Gale Centre are involved in a wide range of projects relating to gender.

The Centre is actively working to develop these research strengths, fostering collaboration and developing new projects in our key research areas of social inclusion, citizenship and health.

Our key research areas are:

  • Gender and Leadership
  • Gender, Health and Care
  • Belonging, Connectedness, Well-being
  • Lived Sexualities
  • Gender and Environment

 

Gender and Leadership

Female talent remains one of the most underutilized resource in business, economy, politics, and society. In most countries around the world women remain in the minority when it comes to senior positions in both the public and private sectors (e.g. OECD 2009; McKinsey and Company 2010, 2012; Ernst and Young 2013).The obvious question is why aren't there more women in leadership positions? What personal, social and economic factors lead to low representation of women in leadership? Are there social, economic and business costs for having disproportionate representation of genders in leadership positions? Are there significant differences in leadership styles according to gender? What are the effective solutions to close the gender gap in leadership? The research strand on women and leadership is a multi-disciplinary field, bringing together economics, business, sociology, and other disciplines to investigate these and related questions.

Theme leader: A/Prof Duygu Yengin. Email: duygu.yengin@adelaide.edu.au

  • Feminist Mentoring for the Contemporary University

    Members of the Fay Gale Centre have been working on a project that aims to re-define mentoring and generate new practices of feminist mentorship within the academy.  Our approach is guided by a feminist ethics of care, acknowledging that traditional models of mentoring replicate a singular ‘heroic’ masculine model based on individual performance, inadvertently perpetuating gendered power hierarchies (Dennis & Behle 2021). It is well-recognised that there are entrenched and existing structural inequalities relating to career progression for academic women at all levels, and that Covid-19 has added significant work intensification, and on-going challenges for women. Dr Claire Harris has been undertaking interviews with academic women across 3 universities in South Australia since late 2022.  The team are about to begin work on a first report, which confirms that universal mentoring programs reproduce and internalise institutional norms of gendered success. Importantly, this work is identifying different practices and spaces of mentoring, and how mentoring can be developed as a politics of collective care, in which multiple models of success are equally valued. 


    Investigators: Professor Megan Warin, Professor Katie Barclay, Professor Vivienne Moore, Dr Connie Musolino, Dr Alexandra Peralta, Dr Dianne Rodger, Dr Tiziana Torresi

     

     

  • Adelaide's Academic Women: Historical and Biographical Reflections 1970 to 2022

    The focus for this project has turned to thinking about publications and the possibility of expanding the research to make the project an Australia-wide study. We are fortunate to have third-year student Eve Marlow undertaking an internship this semester. Eve is primarily working on archival research looking at gender equity initiatives in Adelaide’s universities over the last 50 years and how they shaped opportunities for academic women. She is particularly interested in initiatives to support LGBTQI and communities. 

    Investigators: Professor Katie Barclay, Dr Prudence Black

  • Gender Responsive Budgeting

    Gender-responsive budgeting (GBR) shines a light on the different impacts of government spending and revenue raising decisions on equality between women, men, and diverse people. It involves analysing the impacts of government expenditure and revenue raising on different groups of men and women and making improvements to budgetary decisions and processes to promote gender equality.

    Since Australia pioneered GRB in the mid-1980s, more than 100 initiatives have emerged across the globe with prominent government-led initiatives in Canada and Iceland, and at the sub-national level in Andalucía, Spain. In 1985 South Australia became the first State to introduce GRB.

    The Federal Government re-introduced GRB in 2022 as part of its commitment to put gender equality at the heart of policy and decision-making and is encouraging States and Territories to embed gender equality in its policy and budget decision-making processes. At the State level Queensland, ACT, Victoria, Tasmania, and NSW have launched GRB initiatives with Victoria providing an example of a Treasury led and institutionally embedded initiative under the oversight of State parliament.

    Investigators: Dr Alexandra Peralta, Dr Nathan Manning, Dr Monica Costa, Professor Emerita Rhonda Sharp

Gender, Health and Care 

Gender (and its intersections with a range of other key socio-cultural structures such as social class, racism/discrimination, ethnicity, sexualities, and abilities) affects many aspects of health and illness and is a powerful social determinant of health.  Gender influences how we experience our bodies, relationships between people, exposure to harmful activities and occupations, access to and seeking out health care, treatment from health professionals and the health technologies and research that inform diagnostics and medicine, as well as a wide range of other institutions and policies that shape health and wellbeing.  Gender affects the health of men as well as women and those who do not identify with this binary.  However, women are disproportionately responsible for caring for children and the elderly, as well as those who are unwell or differently-abled.  Centre members who research in this area come from a variety of disciplines (psychology, sociology, public health, anthropology, law) and bring a wealth of theoretical frames and methodologies to understand gender and health in local, national and global contexts. In bringing a gendered lens to health, our aim is to highlight the role of social injustice in the creation and perpetuation of health inequities, and to advocate for and enact change.

Theme leaders: Prof Vivienne Moore, Dr Clemence Due & Prof Megan Warin. Email: vivienne.moore@adelaide.edu.au

  • Ongoing Legacies of Discrimination and Violence Network (OLIRN)

    The Ongoing Legacies of Discrimination and Violence Network (OLIRN) is an international and interdisciplinary research network, partnered with Canada (University of Alberta), UK (University of Edinburgh), and Sweden (Karlstad University).

    The research network is concerned with interrogating contemporary and future approaches to ongoing impacts of social injustice and inequalities associated with gender, sexuality, ethnicity and Indigeneity.

    This research network focuses on temporality and intersectionality, topics of research might include: migration, incarceration, child protection, legacies of conflict and war, sexual violence, aging and health and re-imagining the future.

    This research collaboration sees the publication of Living Legacies of Social Injustice: Power, Time and Social Change (eds. C. Beasley and P. Papadelos, Routledge, 2023). 

Belonging, Connectedness, Well-being 

Belonging, connectedness, and well-being is a broad area that engages with issues around citizenship, migration, social justice and social movements. Globalization and technological advances have had a significant impact on the nature of migration, citizenship, inequality and social relations of power. This research strand brings together scholars working across a number of disciplines including the social sciences, humanities, law, and health sciences.

Theme leaders:  Dr Pam Papadelos pam.papadelos@adelaide.edu.au & Dr Nathan Manning nathan.manning@adelaide.edu.au

     

Lived Sexualities

Sexuality, including heterosexuality and the spectrum of LGBTIQ+ sexualities, is significant to identity, to how people live, and how they are treated. Sexuality research has been significant in providing a language and history for a wide-range of human experiences, and to supporting and enabling social and political change in the areas of sex and intimacy, sexual health and the human right to love and create families in a variety of forms. This research strand brings together scholars working on sexual behaviour, sexual identity, sexual health and inter-related issues of gender, queerness, and emotion.

Theme leader: A/Prof Katie Barclay katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au

Gender and Environment 

Gender research has role to play in environmental policy and sustainability generally. Why?

Gendered Terrain of Disaster

Socially Just Conservation

Socially Sustainable

And it can…

  1. Decentre the male subject of environmental policy, through paying greater attention to women and other marginalized social groups in development and environmental initiatives and the understanding that environments mean different things to different groups of people 
  2. Considers the importance of property rights and economic security and a recognition of women's unpaid labour in caring and environmental work 
  3. Provides arguments for the inclusion of women in decision-making and formal environmental governance and
  4. Can be a catalyst for illuminating the transformative potential of gendered struggles for emancipation but also the ambiguities in support for them from outside agencies.

Leader: Prof Melissa Nursey-Bray. Email: melissa.nursey-bray@adelaide.edu.au