International Women's Day 2026

QUT Centre for Justice & QUT Centre for Decent Work and Industry invite you to share in their celebration of International Women’s Day 2026

Directors Professor Rowena Maguire and Associate Professor Penny Williams will outline the feminist research happening within each Centre before a number of our Early Career Researchers will present on their feminist related research.

Dr Emma Graham

Dr Emma Graham is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Work and Regulation in the School of Law and a member of the Centre for Decent Work and Industry.

Emma’s research examines inequalities in labour regulation and practice, anti-discrimination law and constructions of motherhood.

Emma’s presentation will explore how gaps in the minimum conditions afforded to national system employees under the Fair Work Act exacerbate the vulnerability of mothers to discriminatory job loss.

Dr Diana Leon Espinoza

Diana completed her PhD in Political Science at Griffith University. Her research interests include social policies, gender justice, and decent work. Currently, she is a senior research assistant at the School of Management. Diana also holds a Bachelor of Political Science from the University of Costa Rica and a Master of Development and Governance at the Duisburg-Essen University in Germany.

Diana will discuss the adoption of care policies in Latin America: Lessons from the Global South and will use this research to show that the key of analysing the adoption of care policies (or gender equality policies more broadly) lies with understanding the interplay between agents and contexts in the construction of policy problems, solutions, and the political environments.

Saffron Lloyd

Saffron Lloyd is a feminist design researcher and PhD candidate at QUT. Her work sits at the intersection of sport, health, and technology investigating how wearable technologies can better support menstruating athletes with mobility disabilities. Through feminist led co-design and human-centred research, Saffron challenges assumptions of neutrality in innovation and advocates for more inclusive futures in sport.

Saffron will discuss wearable technologies and their promise to optimise performance and improve health outcomes. However, these devices are often designed around male-centred assumptions of stability and universality, limiting their application across diverse bodies. Saffron’s research explores this dynamic through feminist design and co-design practices, recentring the menstruating body, its embodied experience, and its intersection with disability and sporting contexts over time. This work demonstrates how centring lived experience can reshape wearability frameworks and create more equitable futures in sport innovation.

Dr Monica Taylor

Monica is a sociolegal scholar and lecturer at the QUT School of Law. Her research explores climate and disaster justice, adaptation and resilience, with a focus on people and communities most affected by climate harm. Monica brings to academia two decades of work in access to justice innovation and capacity building across the community legal and social service sectors.

Monica will present Burning inequality: Legal responses to the gender dimensions of extreme heat

In this short presentation, Monica will talk about the gender impacts of extreme heat, why extreme heat is a feminist issue, and how law can achieve protections from heatwave harm.

The session will be facilitated by Dr Linda Colley.

Dr Linda Colley has spent her career advocating for fair and safe workplaces.

She is currently an adjunct Professor with the Centre for Decent Work and Industry, working on projects including reproductive health at work and flexible work.

From 2021 to 2025, Linda was the Special Commissioner Equity and Diversity in the Queensland Public service. The role focused on developing strategies and initiatives to promote gender pay equity and support fairness and inclusiveness across the Queensland public sector.

From 2010-2021, Dr Colley was an academic at The University of Queensland and Central Queensland University. Her research focused on gender equality in public services across Australia. Her PhD was a study of Queensland public service employment from 1859-1999. Before that, Dr Colley was a Queensland public servant for nearly 20 years.

From 2017-2021, Dr Colley was Chair of the Queensland Work Health and Safety Board.

Following the presentations there will be discussion, followed by a light lunch.