Despite major changes in workplace gender dynamics over recent decades, disparities continue to persist across industries and cultural contexts, enabling systemic injustices such as gendered expectations, glass ceilings, and unfair compensation to shape professional experiences. Importantly, gender alone does not capture the full complexity of professional inequality. Intersecting identities—such as sexual orientation, age, and race— exacerbate these difficulties, creating nuanced barriers to inclusion and advancement, particularly for individuals from marginalized backgrounds.
Nonetheless, many organizational policies and research frameworks still consider gender as a single, isolated variable. A sophisticated approach is therefore critical, one that integrates organizational, social, and psychological ideas to comprehend how gender, sexual orientation, age and race can affect workplace dynamics and equity. This Research Topic aims to create a thorough framework that highlights the importance of intersectional perspectives in comprehending and addressing gender inequities in the workplace, whilst also contextualizing recent developments. Recent studies have demonstrated that these intersections affect pay equity, leadership opportunities, recognition, and workplace well-being, but gaps remain in understanding the systemic and structural forces that perpetuate disparities within organizational settings.
This Research Topic aims to deepen scholarly and practical engagement with the ways in which intersectional identities shape experiences of gender inequity in the workplace. Specifically, it seeks to illuminate the mechanisms by which structural barriers, social prejudices, and organizational practices hinder or facilitate career progression, psychological well-being, and fair compensation through an intersectional lens. Encouraging a multidisciplinary approach that integrates gender with other identity factors and assesses the impact of existing diversity initiatives is important in helping to translate academic insights into effective strategies for building more inclusive corporate cultures.
We invite contributions that focus on workplace settings and intersectional gender inequities, emphasizing the interplay between gender, sexual orientation, age, and race. We particularly encourage research that identifies both persistent challenges and effective, evidence-based strategies for organizational change. We welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Intersections of Gender with sexual orientation, age, and race -Structural obstacles to leadership positions and career progression -Efficacy of organizational policies that promote equity and inclusion -Social and psychological impacts of intersectional gender discrimination -Strategies for fostering inclusive workplaces that consider multiple identity dimensions
We invite original research articles, case studies, systematic reviews, and theoretical analyses, especially from intersectional and transdisciplinary perspectives.
Article types and fees
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
Brief Research Report
Conceptual Analysis
Editorial
FAIR² Data
General Commentary
Hypothesis and Theory
Methods
Mini Review
Opinion
Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.
Article types
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
