New research project on ‘Gender Equalities at Work’ funded by the AHRC

Professor Colm O’Cinneide, Professor of Human Rights Law at UCL Laws, is involved as a co-investigator in a new two-year ground-breaking research project on ‘Gender Equalities at Work: An Interdisciplinary History of 50 years of Legislation’, to be funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

This project (commencing in January 2021) is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Edinburgh, UCL and UWE Bristol that traverses the fields of law, gender studies, history, industrial relations, and politics. The project will produce the first comprehensive history (from the 1960s to the present) of the enactment, legacy and lived experiences of the Equal Pay Act 1970 and Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (now integrated in the Equality Act 2010) across the four nations of the UK.

Combining archival research and legal analysis with oral history interviews, it will examine the process through which this transformative legislation became law, and trace its subsequent impact on British society. The project will thus explore law in action, as agency, and as personal experience.