Ece Kocabıçak
Senior Lecturer in Sociology, The Open University, UK
The Gender, Labour and Opportunities in Work (GLOW) Network workshop, hosted by Open Societal Challenges at The Open University on 28 April 2026, brought together researchers from several disciplines to examine how gender shapes labour-market participation, employment security, care responsibilities and economic opportunity. The programme was organised around two panels, discussion and a concluding session. Across the workshop, a common concern was the persistence of gendered barriers to work, especially where labour-market institutions, social norms, care arrangements and wider political-economic structures combine to limit women’s access to secure, meaningful and adequately supported employment.
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The first panel opened with Emilie Rutledge’s paper on women, work and workforce localisation in Bahrain. Her contribution addressed the paradox that Bahraini women have high educational attainment and are often well aligned with knowledge-intensive sectors yet remain underutilised in the private sector. By revisiting debates on Bahrainisation through a gendered lens, the paper showed that labour nationalisation cannot be understood only as a question of skills, regulation or employer incentives. It must also confront socio-cultural norms, working conditions, mobility constraints and care responsibilities that continue to disadvantage women and reproduce gendered segmentation between public and private employment. The paper positioned gender equality as central to the success of nationalisation strategies in the Gulf.
Ece Kocabıçak’s presentation broadened the geographical and historical scope by examining rural-to-urban female labour migration in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her paper identified gender discrimination in land inheritance as a key mechanism shaping women’s mobility and employment opportunities. It contrasted a South Asian pathway, where exclusion from landownership and smallholdings restrict women’s migration and non-agricultural labour force participation, with a Sub-Saharan pathway, where statutory equal inheritance rights can support women’s education and delayed marriage without necessarily producing higher levels of paid non-agricultural employment. This contribution highlighted the importance of agrarian property relations for understanding gendered pathways into urban labour markets.
Keetie Roelen’s paper on women in extreme poverty in Haiti shifted attention to the relationship between paid work, social protection and unpaid care. Focusing on the Chemen Lavi Miyò programme implemented by Fonkoze, the paper examined an intervention designed to improve women’s economic empowerment through cash stipends, asset transfers, savings and credit, training and coaching. However, the findings showed that women’s income-generating activities cannot be separated from their existing unpaid work and childcare responsibilities. Without explicit attention to care, empowerment interventions risked increasing women’s drudgery and time burden rather than transforming the conditions under which they work.
Eleni Andreouli’s presentation addressed precarity and gender through a comparative project on young women in insecure work in the UK and India. The paper asked how young women survive precarity and how they might build collective agency and solidarity under conditions of uncertainty. Focusing on sectors such as garment manufacturing, retail and domestic work, and working with partner organisations that support women workers, the project foregrounded lived experience, peer research and knowledge exchange. It contributed to the workshop’s concern with employment insecurity by exploring not only vulnerability, but also solidarity and transformation.
The second panel developed the workshop’s focus on motherhood, care and employment. Philippa Waterhouse and Ayomide Oluseye’s paper examined young women’s navigation of motherhood and economic survival in Cape Coast, Ghana. Drawing on a photovoice project with young women who became mothers before the age of nineteen, the study explored how stigma, limited support, youth unemployment and informal work shaped young mothers’ economic strategies and mental wellbeing. The paper showed that childcare and informal work were deeply intertwined, often in ways that undermined rather than enabled economic participation, and that the emotional costs of survival were central to understanding young motherhood.
Ayşegül Kayaoğlu’s paper provided a quantitative analysis of childcare and maternal employment in Türkiye. Using province-year data on pre-primary capacity and retrospective panel data from first-time mothers, the study asked whether public or private childcare supply raised maternal employment. Its findings indicated that increases in total childcare density raised eligible mothers’ formal employment, but that the effect was concentrated in private provision rather than public provision. The collapse of the effect when a younger sibling was present suggested that full-day care, rather than simply the number of places, was crucial. The paper therefore argued that the structure, hours and rationing of childcare provision were decisive for women’s employment outcomes.
The Mumentum Team’s contribution focused on tackling the motherhood penalty at work. Drawing on two large-scale Open University research programmes and collaboration with the Department for Work and Pensions, the team presented evidence-based toolkits for parents and employers. These resources aimed to improve return-to-work experiences, reduce inconsistent support and promote sustainable employment. The presentation was especially attentive to non-standard work, including public-facing, shift-based and non-desk-based roles, and to the diverse experiences of mothers. Its intersectional approach recognised that workplace inclusion required policies and practices that addressed structural inequalities rather than treating mothers as a homogeneous group.
Taken together, the workshop demonstrated that gendered labour-market inequalities cannot be understood in isolation from the wider social, economic and institutional conditions that shape women’s lives. Across diverse geographical contexts, the presentations showed how care responsibilities, property relations, migration pathways, precarious employment, childcare provision and workplace practices interact to structure women’s access to paid work, economic security and collective agency. The discussions also highlighted the importance of moving beyond narrow measures of labour-market participation to consider the quality, sustainability and social conditions of work.