Name: Gendered Labor Transformed (Roundtable Discussion)
Start: 2026-06-11T15:00:00+02:00
Location: Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien, Austria

Gendered Labor Transformed (Roundtable Discussion)

This event is part of the RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences "Transformations of Labor". See recet.at/festival for more information.
Event venue: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1
Position of the tent: https://goo.gl/maps/8FjYQNtdnaUiKCcs6
Roundtable discussion with Dorothy Sue Cobble (Rutgers University) and Ines Wagner (University of Oslo), moderated by Alexandra Ghiţ (GWZO Leipzig).
Gender and labor structured modernity and underpin our current, post-modern, late capitalist age. What are new ways of understanding what gender does to work and what work does to gender? What transformative potential do gender and work hold in an age of simultaneous crises?
Bringing together two outstanding scholars of gender, labor and the economy, this panel spotlights visionary research on gender and work in the 20th and 21st century. It focuses on new, concrete, findings concerning the people, practices and processes that have made visible issues such as care work by working mothers, working women's activism, and recent evolutions in gendered wage differentials in Europe.
This panel seeks to foreground themes and topics in the history of women’s and gendered work that may help historize our unequal present as nevertheless bearing the luminous traces of many who struggled – seriously and stubbornly – for better working conditions and fairer knowledge on labor issues.
Dorothy Sue Cobble is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Labor Studies at Rutgers University, USA. She is the author of multiple prize-winning books and articles on workers, social movements, and political thought in the US and globally. Recent honors include an Honorary Doctorate of Social Science from Stockholm University in 2017 and election to the Society of American Historians in 2018. Currently, she is co-authoring with Susan Zimmermann a transnational biography of German socialist politician and intellectual Toni Sender and finishing a book of essays on how the far-seeing ideas of labor thinkers of the past can help move us toward a more caring, fairer world. https://www.dorothysuecobble.com/
Ines Wagner is a research professor at the University of Oslo's ARENA Center in Norway and was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies during the 2023–2024 academic year. Her research focuses on equality and inequality in European labor markets, particularly cross-national and sectoral dynamics. She currently leads the ERC project, "WAGE: Egalitarian but not Equal," which examines how collective bargaining systems shape gendered wage differentials across Europe. The project also explores policy pathways to reduce structural pay inequalities in gender-segregated labor markets. She is the author of Workers Without Borders: Posted Work and Precarity in the EU (Cornell University Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in leading journals, including the Socio-Economic Review, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and the British Journal of Industrial Relations. She has held fellowships at Johns Hopkins University, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and the European University Institute.
Alexandra Ghiț is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Center for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) Leipzig. She is the author of the monograph Welfare Work without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter, 2025) and one of the ten co-authors of the major monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A New Transnational History (UCL Press, 2025), among others. Currently, she is working on gendered postwar reconstruction before the Cold War (1944–1948), in Romania placed in transnational perspective. Her other research interests include women’s political thought in Romania and Moldova across the 20th century, and international trade union cooperation in the 1990s.
More information: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/gendered-labor-transformed