Rethinking and revisiting the current state of Gender Equality in the Workplace: Moving upward, moving forward

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Introduction

Gender equality is a global issue and recent scholarship continues to report how workplaces perpetuate inequalities related to gender (Amins and Munir, 2020; Eweje and Nagano, 2021; Jogulu and Franken, 2023; Sajjad and Eweje, 2021; Van Laer, Verbruggen and Janssens, 2021) despite their intentions and efforts to promote gender parity. This special issue aims to advance our understanding of why gender inequality persists in the fields of business and human resources, accounting, and finance. Specifically, we encourage submissions on how further efforts in workplace settings and organisations needs to change, adapt or revisited to focus on improving gender equality to enable better profitability, productivity, and well-being of all employees. This call also advances our contemporary understanding of gender equality or help explain why gender inequality persists. Finally, as editors, we are interested in the evolving status of women in workplaces today. 
Women continue to face discrimination, disempowerment, and exclusion in terms of employment and career progression (Eweje and Nagano, 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic has also impacted gender equality globally by severely affecting women’s employment due to social distancing measures, closures of schools and day care centers and offering flexible working arrangement (Sachs, Schmidt-Traub, Kroll, Lafortune, Fuller and Woelm, 2020; Carli, 2020). Research indicates that although gender equality drives creativity and better problem-solving skills, lower recruitment costs and better employee retention (Cox and Blake 1991; Østergaard, Timmermans and Kristinsson, 2011), women continue to face gender bias and discrimination in their workplaces. The persistent incidents of gender inequality in organisations reflect the lack of responsibility by senior management, a phenomenon either legitimized by organisational policies or rendered invisible by a belief in individual choice.
Contemporary research also needs to revisit the debate on the business case of gender equality as it limits the discourse and the possibilities for establishing ways to attain gender equality. For example, examining the impact of gender diversity in top management on financial performance may discourage companies from investing in the promotion of gender equality if they do not receive financial benefits as a result (Kulik, 2022). Instead, research need to examine and investigate other benefits beyond financial performance (Kulik, 2022), to include structural and cultural barriers to advancing gender equality in practice. The adoption of different methodologies and theoretical lenses is also required to make further progress on this topic (Hoobler, Masterson, Nkomo and Michel, 2018; Hosoda and Nagano, 2023; Kulik, 2022) through practical promotion of organisational policies that enables individual agency without trapping women in categories that deny them equality. 
The goal of this special issue is to advance the current research topics on gender equality to move upward and forward gender equality by exploring the factors that promote or hinder gender equality, the initiatives, the outcomes of the gender equality, and the understanding of its mechanisms from various perspectives and disciplines.

List of Topic Areas

We welcome diverse methodological approaches, such as empirical, theoretical, and experimental research, and systematic reviews, from a variety of perspectives but encourage contributions that deal with the issues outlined below. However, this is a non-exhaustive list.

• Revisiting gender inequality mechanisms in the workplace 
• Refining gender equality and organisational performance 
• Reexamining factors that promote and hinder gender equality. 
• The role of contemporary Human Resource Management practice in promotion of gender equality in workplaces 
• Design and implementation of management control system to enable gender-equality. 
• Gender equality post COVID-19 pandemic

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cg 
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/cg 
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/11/2023 
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 30/04/2024

Guest Editors

Dr. Masahiro Hosoda, College of Business, Rikkyo University, Japan, [email protected] 
Dr. Uma Jogulu, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University, Australia, [email protected] 
Dr. Hitomi Toyosaki, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ibaraki University, Japan, [email protected]