Tag: gender

20th Gender & Education Association International Conference

Conference Dates

  • Pre-conference Day: Student/ECR Workshops and Teachers’ Symposium: Monday 17 June 2024 to be hosted/sponsored by Charles Sturt University Division of Learning, and the Charles Sturt University Research Office
  • Conference Dates: Tuesday 18 June to Thursday 20 June 2024

For more information can be found here

Read the Charles Sturt University press release about the conference.

Conference Theme: Be the Change

The Gender and Education Association 2024 conference seeks to bring together education practitioners from all levels of education, activists, academics, students, community members and leaders, artists, researchers,
lawmakers, policymakers, and media to explore the need for change for diversity and inclusion, positionality, and redressing inequalities through both an intersectionality and a gendered lens. Engaging in the debates of inclusion in education is important but pivotal are the pedagogies and ideologies that underpin how we include and reframe the systemic and structural barriers that led to culminative disadvantage. Given the global impact of the pandemic with women being hardest hit with career stability and access to education and services, a call to action is needed to go beyond a deficit model to that of universal inclusion – designing education and pedagogy to be inclusive and accessible to all regardless of ones identified intersections. Our conference theme, Be the Change, aims to be a catalyst for discussion and action to redress global and institution inequality through the power of education and knowledge.

  • Be the Change, in understanding that individuals have agency within organisations and society to influence systems and structures that impact on education across the globe.
  • Be the Change, is understanding your own intersections and identities and how these impact on an individual’s positionality and interface with educational, political, economic, and societal systems.
  • Be the Change, is acknowledging how lived experience can give to voice and activism for change for the greater good in overcoming inequality and utilising education as a powerful tool
  • Be the Change, is delivering innovation through codesign for more inclusive and accessible education.
  • Be the Change, is acknowledging we all have a part to play

Themes which could be explored include (but are not limited to):

  1. What are the big questions and issues that need tackling?
    a. Local, national, and global inequalities in education
    b. Access and success (attrition and progression) in education
    c. Inequalities across different contexts, geography, and levels of education
    d. Employment in education – inequalities, marginalisation, and resilience in education
  2. One size doesn’t fit all
    a. First Nations perspectives to education
    b. De-homogenising the majority
    c. Taking an intersectional approach
  3. Progressive a/genda(er)
    a. Social justice, human rights and education
    b. Gender identity and gender expression in and for education
    c. Ethics of exclusion – refugees, displaced persons, and environmental refugees – access and surveillance of educational freedoms, Faith and Islamophobia, antisemitism, and religious intolerance in education
    d. Classism, ableism, and racism in education
    e. Making the invisible visible – Disability, neurodiversity, and mental health in education
  4. Innovation and creation of pedagogy for inclusion
    a. creativity in a gendered/non-gendered environment
    b. use of alternate creative media, music, art as a knowledge broker
    c. Universal design in education
  5. Practice translation for impact
    a. Case studies
    b. Systemic and structural change for inclusion
    c. Initiatives for change
  6. Being the voice of change – new developments and future facing research/action
    a. Decolonialisation
    b. De-whitening intersectionality
    c. Feminism and anti-oppressive strategies in education
    d. Activism

We will invite contributions in a range of diverse formats including (and not limited to) 20-minute oral presentations, posters (digital and onsite), roundtables, themed panels, symposia, workshops, creative presentations and ‘other’ which will be led by the abstracts received.

Conference Team

Conference Co-Chairs: 

  • Associate Professor Cate Thomas School of Social Work & Arts, Athena Swan Convenor
  • Kate Wood-Foye, Director External Engagement Charles Sturt University (Port Macquarie)

Conference Organising Committee

  • Dr Fredrik Velander School of Social Work & Arts
  • Dr Denise Wood Division of Learning & Teaching Social Equality Intersectionality & Inclusion Research Group
  • Emmaline Lear SFHEA Manager Researcher Development Office of Research Services & Graduate Studies
  • Dr Jennifer Podesta Graduate Studies Engagement Officer Charles Sturt University
  • Dr Jacquie Tinkler Division of Learning and Teaching
  • Deanne Tilden Campus Ally Lead
  • Bethany Brightmore Faculty of Arts & Education Marketing
  • Monique Sheppard Post-Doctoral Fellow
  • Halima Kramel Community Relations Officer Charles Sturt Port Macquarie Event Support & Logistics

About GEA Conferences

This will be the first GEA conference since 2019 after the pandemic disrupted the amazing plans for the 2020 conference. If this will be your first GEA conference, then you can learn more about the previous 19 conferences here. You can also read reflections from previous conference attendees to learn more about what to expect at a GEA conference:

About The Gender and Education Association: GEA is a volunteer-led international intersectional feminist charity. Since 1997, our community of educators, researchers, activists, leaders, artists, and more have been working to challenge and eradicate gender stereotyping, sexism, and gender inequality within and through education. UK charity number: 1159145

About Charles Sturt University: ‘Inclusive’ is one of the four core values at Charles Sturt University. Our commitment to gender equity is vital to attracting the best researchers and academics. Charles Sturt University’s Athena SWAN action plan outlines 43 actions that have been developed to reduce gender inequity, not only in STEMM but across the institution. These actions address issues identified in recruitment and induction; career progression and promotion; the gender pay gap; research; leave and flexible work arrangements; promoting inclusivity; and embedding the Athena SWAN principles within core business. Our participation augments the Leadership Development for Women program, the Senior Women’s Leadership Forum, and the University’s Workplace Gender Equity Strategy (2018-2022). The University has also received recognition as a Women in Stem Decadal Plan Champion. Charles Sturt University is a forward-thinking university that engages with community and students from vulnerable backgrounds such as First Nations, first in family to attend university and low social economic status. Charles Sturt prides itself on its ethos yindyamarra winhanganha. The Wiradjuri phrase yindyamarra winhanganha means the wisdom of respectfully knowing how to live well in a world worth living in. This phrase represents who we are at Charles Sturt University – our ethos. It comes from traditional Indigenous Australian knowledge, but it also speaks to the mission of a university – to develop and spread wisdom to make the world a better place. 

Managing editor: Lisa (Zhiyun Bian)

From Female Graduates to Female Insurance Agents: Educationally Channeled Labour Mobility from Mainland China to Hong Kong

Research highlighted

Zhou, S. & Song, J. (2022). From Female Graduates to Female Insurance Agents: Educationally Channeled Labor Mobility from Mainland China to Hong Kong. Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, 171(3). Available at: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/kopLQ74k-9n8I3ShrZtwWA

中文版本

In the increasingly interwoven global trends of educational mobility and labor migration, a growing number of young women have obtained higher education and acquired greater labor mobility, and have been involved in service work that is more professional and with higher job status. Nevertheless, educational mobility and labor migration are commonly regarded as two independent research fields. Education migration is often related to a promotion of employment opportunities for young people, which provides chances of social upward mobility for men and women. For labor migration studies from a gender perspective, female migrants are often found to concentrate in labor-intensive and low-paid service work. Little attention has been paid to the field where the two topics are related. In Hong Kong, due to the cross-border expansion of the insurance industry in recent years, many female graduates from mainland China have benefited from their cultural capital and cross-border social connections and have been recruited as insurance agents. This study examines the gendered experiences of cross-border labor mobility of these atypical skilled migrants and professional service workers.

This study adopted a qualitative research approach based on in-depth interviews with 32 female graduates who had mainland backgrounds and worked as insurance agents in Hong Kong. The study also draws on participant observation of their work and life, as well as online ethnography about how individuals and companies presented such cross-border labor mobility on social media. To examine women’s educationally channeled labor mobility, this study focuses on how they were recruited and why they chose to become insurance agents. The findings indicate that Hong Kong’s cross-border insurance business tended to recruit highly educated women with mainland backgrounds as professional, independent, and elite women, meanwhile with an emphasis on their patient and empathetic femininity. Such narratives restructured and reinforced gender stereotypes prevalent in service work. These highly educated women were able to utilize human capital and cross-border freedom to pursue greater autonomy in career choice against the control of natal families in places of origin. Nevertheless, these young women also faced a double marginality in the host labor market regarding gender and geography, and they still needed to balance family obligations and career aspirations over the life course. Women’s cross-border mobility helped them to pursue individualistic aspirations and negotiate new career pathways, which challenged traditional gender stereotypes in low-end feminized service work, but their professional and independent workplace images were still constrained by the gendered division of labor and structural inequalities in public and private spheres.

By focusing on female graduates in the cross-border insurance industry, this study demonstrates how the intersection of educational mobility and labor migration can provide new employment opportunities for highly educated women. To some extent, women’s cross-border participation in professional service work has undermined traditional gender role expectations, but their personal choices have not formed a fundamental challenge to gender and structural inequalities in the labor market and domestic spheres. Bridging the two research traditions on educational mobility and labor migration, this study suggests incorporating women’s education-based resource and horizon into the study of their working experience in the host labor market, and linking women’s diverse career choices with their evolving gendered self-positioning processes. The new perspectives can add to a better understanding of how women’s migration brings about new economic opportunities as well as social pressure, and contribute to a more comprehensive reflection on the gender and social implications of women’s evolving career choices.

Author Bio

Siyuan Zhou (周思媛),
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ms. ZHOU Siyuan (周思媛) is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies Programme and the Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include gender and work, migration, and female entrepreneurship. Her doctoral project is about “doing gender” and “doing business” between Hong Kong and mainland China among female IANG insurance agents (Email: siyuanzhou@link.cuhk.edu.hk).

Dr. Jing Song (宋婧),
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Dr. Jing Song (宋婧) is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and an Associate Researcher (by courtesy) at Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include family, gender, work, urbanization, migration and China’s market transition. She has published in China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Urban Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Work Employment and Society, Population Space and Place, China Review, Journal of Sociology, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Housing Studies, Asian Anthropology, and so on. Her book Gender and Employment in Rural China was published in 2017 by Routledge (Email: jingsong@cuhk.edu.hk).

Managing editor: Lisa (Zhiyun) Bian