The current administration has disproportionately targeted transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people, despite accounting for less than 1% of the population (Jones, 2024). Though there has been a flurry of executive orders issued restricting the rights of this population, Executive Order 14168 (i.e., Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government) and Executive Order 14151 (Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing) are likely to be particularly impactful for workplaces. This is because Executive Order 14168 challenges the existing federal protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extended through Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), by declaring sex as binary and biological and denying the existence of transgender people. In addition, EO14151 eliminates federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and practices, which limits organizational practices and policies that might otherwise create inclusive and equitable environments for transgender employees. Therefore, this policy brief aims to discuss these executive orders, the existing protections they aim to alter, and the potential implications for transgender employees, organizations, and industrial-organizational professionals.

Using a nationally representative US sample of 9,623 adults from 26 countries of ancestries, we investigate the role of culture in explaining the gender gap in financial literacy. We find that (i) the smaller the gender gap in financial literacy in the country of ancestry, the higher the financial understanding of women in the US relative to men and (ii) higher patience and lower altruism in the country of ancestry are associated with greater financial literacy in the US for men but not women. Even after controlling for gender variation in these preferences, country-of-ancestry gender gap in financial literacy remains strongly associated with women’s higher financial literacy, especially for knowledge of inflation and risk diversification. This finding suggests that gender differences in financial literacy are shaped by social constructs.

In 1959 and 1960, Cameroonian women nationalists visited the People’s Republic of China. These members of the Union démocratique des femmes camerounaises (UDEFEC) practiced what I term a “diplomacy of intimacy,” which highlighted the effects of colonialism on their bodies, fertility, and intimate relationships to create a shared affective experience of anticolonial solidarity with their Chinese counterparts. Expanding the definition of “diplomat” to reflect how diplomacy functioned in the decolonizing world reveals that women played a much larger role than previously understood. These women diplomats remained largely invisible to the Western powers and to the postcolonial Cameroonian government, but Chinese sources provide a valuable vantage point on their diplomacy. By drawing on sources from Cameroon, China, France, and the UK, I demonstrate that during decolonization African nationalist women represented their parties on the world stage, exercising far more diplomatic power than appears in histories of decolonization focused on the West.

The article analyses archival materials from the drafting of the UN Marriage Convention (1962) between 1949 and 1962. This Convention is usually understood as a human- and women’s rights Convention. The article expands this understanding by showing that the Convention was produced through a collaboration between the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and the Trusteeship Council, Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories, and metropolitan administrators of former colonies, then having the status of dependent territories. The treaty-makers focused exclusively on marriages in the dependencies but were in great doubt about the form and amount of force in these marriages. They, accordingly, were unsure how to measure such force. Nevertheless, they proceeded with the drafting, as their visions of free marriage and emancipated women were bolstered by their commitment to the ongoing economic transformation accompanying decolonization of the territories. The article shows how human rights of marriage thus emerged from ideas about economic development convoluted with ideas about marriages and women; and articulates this history’s theoretical implications for the rights’ applicability today. It also expands our understanding of international women’s rights as regulatory models, and of the post-colonial political economy of international law.

This study examines gender bias in the investigative work of medieval inquisitors, focusing on Albert of Castellario’s trial of the Waldensians in Giaveno, Italy, in 1335. Drawing upon advancements in sociological and criminological literature, we conceptualize an inquisitorial trial as a discretionary information-gathering endeavor contingent upon the inquisitor’s judgment in deciding which leads to pursue. Employing social network analysis and survival methods, we evaluate whether Albert demonstrated gender biases in his investigative decisions, particularly regarding the weight assigned to testimonies from men versus women. Our findings demonstrate that Albert was more inclined to investigate men and prioritize their testimonies, even where similar levels of incriminating evidence were present for both genders. These results highlight the influence of societal attitudes toward gender on inquisitorial practices, on the representativeness of historical records, and on prevailing understandings of heretical groups. Furthermore, this study underscores the broader utility of our methodological framework for addressing related historical inquiries, including the political motivations behind the medieval inquisition.

Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

In the UK, parents receiving working-age social security benefits have been the target of intensifying labour market activation policies, particularly following the introduction of Universal Credit (UC). Concurrently, state support for parents has reduced, and help with childcare is complex and limited. Under UC, parents, and increasingly mothers, are meeting more often with street-level agents, Work Coaches, who are responsible for ‘activating’ parents into work. Work Coaches operate at the interface between the state and citizens, but we know little about street-level implementation of UC. Through analysing interviews with ten Work Coaches and sixty-seven parents, this article draws on a gendered street-level approach to explore how policy limits choices for Work Coaches (by restricting spaces for personalisation) and parents (by rules determining how to manage work and care responsibilities). Within this rigid context, moral assumptions of low-income parents emerge, with increased expectations placed on mothers and outdated assumptions about fathers.

Our study contributes to the literature on choice shifts in group decision-making by analyzing how the level of risk-taking within a group is influenced by its gender composition. In particular, we investigate experimentally whether group composition affects how preferences ‘shift’ when comparing individual and group choices. Consistent with hypotheses derived from previous literature, we show that male-dominated groups shift toward riskier decisions in a way that is not explained by any simple preference aggregation mechanism. We discuss potential channels for the observed pattern of choice shifts.

When traditional measures for material conditions are scarce or unreliable, body mass, height, and weight are complements to standard income and wealth measures. A persistent question in welfare studies is the 19th century’s 2nd and 3rd quarter’s stature diminution, a pattern known as the antebellum paradox. However, the question may not be well stated nor experienced equally by women and non-white male samples. The late 19th century’s political Granger, Greenback, and Populist movements may have affected farmer and non-farmer’s net nutrition. Despite 19th and early 20th century US political movements, farmers had greater BMIs, taller statures, and heavier weights than non-farmers. From the 1870s through 1890s, women’s body mass, height, and weight increased relative to men. Individuals of African or mixed European-African descent had heavier weights and greater BMIs than their taller, European-white counterparts, indicating that the traditional antebellum paradox needs to include women and non-European males and weight measures.

Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights’ when combined with states’ anti-imperialist victim branding, and uncritical anti-imperialist solidarities give rise to a reactionary politics I call the ‘Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights’. Here, anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of culture are recast as victims, and the state is treated as synonymous with the population it rules. Western imperialism, the human rights corpus, and those deploying human rights conceived of as extensions of Western imperialism are recast as the savages. Finally, leftist thinkers, anti-imperialist thought, and the resisting victim state and its constructions of Indigenous culture become the saviors. This politics eclipses local populations’ agency and lived experiences by (1) diminishing the moral weight of both the state’s transgressions and the human rights paradigm, (2) interrupting a sustained focus on the anti-imperialist-branding state’s acts of subjugation, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture as traditional saviourism does (but valorising rather than vilifying it), and (4) adhering to notions of moral complexity which deny or obscure the elements of moral clarity encompassed.

This special issue stems from the 2022 Association for the Study of Modern Italy conference, reflecting on key turning points in modern Italian history through the lens of ‘small histories’. Drawing on contemporary international historiography and the contributions in the present volume, this introduction discusses how microhistorical, biographical and related approaches may challenge or refine dominant interpretations in that they abstract from ‘grand narratives’ to instead highlight dynamics and actors that may appear to be on the margins of major historical processes. The studies in this special issue engage in particular with the intersections of identity, space and memory. Themes such as Fascism, the reshaping of Italian identity through cultural policies and the creation of a collective memory, colonialism and postcolonialism, migration and evolving gender roles are explored in diverse contexts from interwar South Tyrol through to contemporary Palermo. Together, these ‘small histories’ demonstrate the methodological and interpretative richness of focused studies in tracing Italy’s transformation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They challenge binaries such as centre–periphery and local–global, while shedding new light on the relation between individual experiences and the creation of shared spaces, memories and identities.