This article compares paid parental leave policies across nineteen Latin American jurisdictions, examining their effectiveness in promoting equality in caregiving. Despite notable expansions in social protection, and constitutional recognition of shared parental responsibilities in countries like Ecuador and Mexico, the region has not kept pace with global trends towards equitable leave entitlements. While most countries offer paid maternity leave, paternity leave remains minimal or symbolic, with two nations – Cuba and Honduras – offering none. A persistent gender imbalance remains in leave allocation, where fathers’ entitlements are often secondary or tokenistic. Drawing on a new dataset as of January 2025, the article evaluates how current policies support or hinder the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities while emphasising the importance of legal reform to drive social change. By centring fatherhood in policy discourse, the article calls for more inclusive and equitable reforms to ensure that all parents can participate meaningfully in childcare.

The rule of law crisis in Europe seen as a gendered phenomenon – The rule of law as a concept is itself gendered – The gendered dimension of democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe is a central, not peripheral feature – Responses to authoritarian populist attacks on the rule of law should also address its gendered elements – Opposition to the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence – The rise of a war against so-called ‘gender ideology’ – Increasingly restrictive reproductive rights regimes – The retrenchment of the ‘traditional’ family and traditional gender roles – EU response weak and ambivalent – European Court of Human Rights’ gender equality case law a work in progress

This article examines Bianca Lovado’s human rights complaints as the first trans woman transferred from a men’s to a women’s remand facility in British Columbia, Canada. Despite the initial transfer, upon re-arrest, Ms. Lovado was inconsistently placed in men’s and women’s facilities and was denied gender-affirming care between 2015 and 2019. Drawing on theories of biopolitical and queer/trans necropolitical governance, I conduct a thematic analysis of her five complaints against BC Corrections. The paper investigates how, despite human rights legislation protecting gender identity and expression, cisnormative sex-based correctional logics regulate trans prisoners. Building on Foucault’s institutions of power, I identify how cisnormative techniques of power led Ms. Lovado to face necropolitical violence via incorrect prison placement and denial of gender-affirming care. Analyzing how Ms. Lovado uses the tribunal to combat necropolitical violence, this paper illustrates the consequences of sex as an institution of power governing over gender, despite equal protections in Canadian law.

Countries across Asia have attempted to expand the involvement of fathers in childcare, motivated by declining birth rates, growing elderly populations, notable gender inequality gaps, and the demand of fathers for paid leave. This article assesses the efforts of twenty-one Asian nations to achieve a more equal distribution of the responsibility for child-rearing by comparing legal entitlements to paid maternity leave, paternity leave, and parental leave. Twenty-one jurisdictions are classified according to three models. Model A is a ‘gender equality’ model where non-transferable paid leave is provided in more equal share to parents, with an additional post-birth period exclusively for birth mothers. Model B is a ‘quota for fathers’ approach where a number of days or weeks are provided in amounts that fall far short of the amount of paid leave exclusively offered to mothers. Model C captures countries that offer no legal entitlements for paid leave for fathers. The data reveals the extent to which Asia lags behind global good practice in the provision of leave to different-sex and same-sex parents, with regional laws reflecting the view that caregiving primarily or exclusively falls upon women. Generous, paid and non-transferable leave for fathers is needed to increase leave-taking.

The Economic Community of West African States (“ECOWAS”) has established one of the most comprehensive free movement regimes. By declaring West Africa a borderless region, the organization affirms the right of free movement for all citizens of member states. Nevertheless, significant obstacles to securing this right persist and is particularly prevalent for female migrants. Studies reveal that widespread corruption, border harassment, and bureaucratic inefficiencies restrict female migration opportunities. However, current scholarship inadequately addresses the interrelation between regional mobility law, infrastructures, and female migration. This Article examines the gendered dimensions of access to mobility infrastructures from the perspective of ECOWAS officials. Mobility infrastructures are conceptualized as comprising legal, physical, and technological components that collectively facilitate or restrict movement. The analysis draws on documentary evidence and insights from 19 semi-structured interviews with ECOWAS Commission officials. It shows that access to mobility infrastructures is predominantly determined by embedded gender norms, laws, and practices. By analyzing accounts from officials involved in constructing the free movement regime, the Article provides unique insights into the disparities between institutional intentions, legal frameworks, and mobility trajectories. In doing so, it contributes to research on free movement in West Africa, mobility infrastructures, and the emerging scholarship on legal infrastructures.

Key changes to the Paid Parental Leave Act 2010 (Cth) (‘PPL Act’), which offers minimum wage payments to parents on parental leave, took effect in July 2023. These changes sought to improve the gender equal utilisation of parental leave. This article assesses these changes to that end. The article also explores the regulation of employer-funded parental leave policies, which has been under-researched to date, drawing upon recent Workplace Gender Equality Agency data and interviews with human resource professionals. The data reveals that employer-funded parental leave policies often provide higher levels of income replacement than the PPL Act but mirror many of the PPL Act’s features that discourage gender equal parenting. These findings highlight the need for further reform in the regulation of paid parental leave to increase take up amongst men. Such reform will require flexible parental leave policies with non-transferrable and generous entitlements for all parents with high levels of income replacement.

This Article examines how World Athletics, a private regulatory body, has shaped the legal norm of gender equality. Focusing on three landmark legal challenges to World Athletics’ regulation of gender, this Article shows how the organization has constructed the meaning of gender equality as it has pursued global, monopolistic, and autonomous authority. World Athletics has retrofitted this norm to align with its longstanding regulatory practices by essentializing women, coopting rivalrous actors, and depoliticizing sex. In doing so, the organization has repeatedly construed and constrained the meaning of gender equality to bolster its private regulatory authority.

Gender and age are central organising principles of social relations, with socially constructed gendered and age-based norms influencing patterns of social behaviour, power and inequality. Despite recent literature highlighting the importance of subjective measures of equality, including as a significant predictor of wellbeing, there is a gap in studies focused on subjective equality in research on ageing. Drawing on an equality ranking exercise and life herstory interviews with 20 older-aged women (65+) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article focuses on the intersectionality of age and gender, analysing the ways in which participants constructed their experiences of equality over the lifecourse from their standpoint as older-aged women. The analysis reveals a significant rise in subjective equality from childhood to older age, with more varied responses in childhood and a convergence of responses from adolescence onwards. Participants’ constructions of equality differed: age was the dominant construct of equality women ascribed to their childhood years, while gender inequality came to the fore during their teenage years. In early to mid-adulthood, women found ways to navigate gendered inequality in various life domains, while in older adulthood equality was constructed as freedom and life satisfaction. This trajectory suggests that the frames individuals use to make sense of equality and their personal experiences are not fixed; they are fluid and shift throughout the lifecourse.

Nepal is classified as a low-middle income country (World Bank, 2023), and like other such countries, it is under international pressure to attain gender equality targets in order to receive international aid. However, Nepal is also permeated by widespread perceptions that girls are subordinate to boys, which influences girls’ access to education, information, health and the labour market (Upadhaya & Sah, 2019). Women face restrictions in terms of their basic ability to ‘independently venture outside the household, maintain the privacy of their bank accounts, use mobile phones, or become employed’ (Karki & Mix, 2022: 413). Illiteracy disproportionately affects females, with 58.95% of illiterates being women and girls (UNESCO, 2021). Notwithstanding this, recent years have seen some progress in enhancing gender equality in Nepal, and females currently enjoy higher enrolment rates than males across secondary education (UNESCO, 2023). This article, however, provides evidence that the recent trend to offer English-medium education risks setting back progress made by creating a gender-differentiated system that could yield different outcomes for boys and girls and potentially restrict girls’ future trajectories post school and contribute to broader gender inequality in society.

Transitivity has come to be recognized as a promising heuristic tool for uncovering implicit ideologies in a wide range of areas. Though it has been used to explore worldviews in several kinds of discourse, nearly all have relied solely on qualitative analyses. Statistical analysis can offer a fuller understanding of past societies. This study applies a gradient, discourse-based understanding of transitivity, which lends itself nicely to corpus-based analysis, to data from 16th-century New Spain. In colonial Mexico, female behaviors were often strictly circumscribed. This paper uses a quantitative, corpus-based framework to examine how gender inequality is reflected in patterns of transitivity. It is found that female subjects are significantly associated with imperfective contexts, nonfinite constructions, akinesis, and low affectedness of the object—all markers of lower transitivity. Thus, for the most part, in these data, women are represented as inactive, inert, and powerless.

Women experience climate change in different ways to men and are often disproportionately affected, highlighting the need for gender-focused climate initiatives. Strengthening laws and policies to address women's and gender issues is one way forward. Yet, less research attention has been given to women and gender in climate change law than in other issues. This article seeks to advance the field by exploring the relevant law, policy and governance commitments made by all African nations under the Paris Agreement. The findings indicate that most African nations include some gender-related commitments, but only a few include detailed legal initiatives ready for implementation. These more detailed initiatives are synthesized to identify a toolbox of options, which are then applied to Tanzania as a case study. This article contributes to the literature by comprehensively analysing the African climate change commitments and by making tangible recommendations for Tanzania.

The introduction of Universal Credit, a new means-tested benefit for working-aged people in the UK, entails a significant expansion of welfare conditionality. Due to mothers’ disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care, women are particularly affected by the new conditionality regime for parents who have the primary responsibility for the care of dependent children. This article draws upon qualitative longitudinal research with twenty-four mothers subject to the new conditionality regime to analyse the gendered impacts of this new policy and whether there is variation in experiences according to social class. The analysis demonstrates that the new conditionality regime devalues unpaid care and is of limited efficacy in improving sustained moves into paid work. It also shows that the negative gendered impacts of the conditionality within Universal Credit are at times exacerbated for working-class mothers.

In the present article,1 I will examine how topics of domestic work, care and family values were critically addressed by female performers in 2022 on various Hungarian stages. Two short analyses will show that the notion of womanhood is deconstructed through questioning superficial and populist images of traditional female roles. While Baby Bumm – Propinquity Effect, a community theatre production highlights the actual toll of becoming a mother, a one-woman-show titled God, Home, Kitchen detects the numerous and often contradicting roles assigned to an average Hungarian female citizen by politicians. Both productions build on the physical limits of the performers’ bodies, the actual burden of taking care of children, as well as fulfilling duties in and outside the household, to show the unreal nature of politicized ideas on women. This is a public topic that further emerged in post-pandemic times, especially in the light of the government's determination of acceptable social participation for women.

This essay recovers the newspaper writings of the Omaha journalist Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche as the first Indigenous woman to publish about the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Her eyewitness accounts challenge mainstream histories of the massacre that focus largely on frontier violence and Indigenous death by rewriting Wounded Knee as a place of Indigenous resilience and of an Indigenous community bound together by the rights and responsibilities of kinship. By prioritizing the stories of surviving Indigenous women and girls, Bright Eyes's reporting speaks to and becomes a precedent for ongoing acts and discourses of Indigenous activism, feminism, resurgence, and self-determination.

In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.

Women face disproportionate challenges while undertaking coastal fieldwork. We draw on 18 responses that specifically raise fieldwork issues from an international survey about perceptions and experiences of gender inequality for those working in coastal sciences to discuss two common themes. These themes are barriers to fieldwork participation and challenges for women working in coastal field settings such as boats or working on beaches, including discrimination and sexual harassment. We suggest five priority behavioural and policy changes to improve the fieldwork experience for women in coastal sciences: (i) publicise field role models and trail blazers, (ii) improve opportunities and capacity for women to undertake fieldwork, (iii) establish field codes of conduct, (iv) acknowledge the challenges women face in the field and provide support where possible, and (v) foster an enjoyable and supportive fieldwork culture.

Supportive supervision has been shown to improve mental health outcomes and job retention for mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) workers in humanitarian contexts. However, the impact of gender on supervision practices has been poorly evaluated and documented in international guidelines to date. To address this gap, qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 MHPSS staff working in diverse humanitarian contexts to identify key gender considerations in supportive supervision. Results show that gender in supervision is influenced by the context of MHPSS work; with culture, religion and gender roles identified as key elements. Participants discuss recruitment mechanisms, highlighting the unequal gender distribution and inequitable opportunities within MHPSS programming. The importance of addressing power dynamics impacted by gender and of ensuring the safety of women within supervision is also highlighted. Finally, participants discuss the gender differences across the various supervisory formats. Altogether, results indicate that gender has the potential to influence supportive supervision within MHPSS, and it is recommended that international guidelines account for nuances of gender in supportive supervision within humanitarian contexts.