Work & Class

There is great interest these days in the role that men can play in building gender equality. Beginning perhaps in the mid-1990s, we’ve seen a significant increase in attention to men’s roles in building gender equality. This was signalled by various developments.

It is 25 years since the Fourth World Conference on Women and its adoption of the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. For all of those who are committed to the visions of gender equality, human rights and social justice expressed in the Beijing Platform for Action and subsequent international declarations and agreements, 2020 was to have been a year of taking stock of progress made and debating priorities and strategies to advance towards these visions.

Meaningful engagement with men and boys is increasingly recognized as critical to gender equality and equity, necessary not only for women’s empowerment, but also for transforming the social and gender norms that reinforce patriarchy and inequality and harm both women and men. The primary challenge embedded in this work is how to engage men and boys effectively without instrumentalizing them as a pathway to women’s empowerment on the one hand, or marginalizing women and girls in gender equity work on the other.

Call for abstracts for the symposium “Making it like a man”: men, masculinities and the modern ’career’.
25- 26 October
University of Helsinki, Finland

Please see the PDF attachment below.

Initiatives aimed at ‘engaging men’ to address gender inequality have gained popularity in recent years. But how much do we really know about the most effective ways to engage men in gender equality?

Most occupational injuries, and the great majority of occupational deaths, are among men. In Australia, males comprise 96% of workplace fatalities (Safe Work Australia 2015), and 61% of workplace injuries or illnesses (ABS 2014).

Men's occupational deaths and injuries are shaped by masculinity - by traditional masculine norms of risk-taking, stoicism, independence, and so on. In this XY collection, we feature key research articles on this area.

That we need to work with men and boys has become a key mantra of health programmes globally, particularly those concerned with HIV, violence and more recently sexual and reproductive health and rights, and yet there is very little known about how effective these programmes are, nor of the challenges, opportunities and politics of this work. A special issue of Culture, Health and Sexuality draws together a number of globally recognised authors to reflect on the field, as well as provide provocative insights into the politics and processes of working with men and boys.