Focus areas

Gender, Inclusion & Justice

The same policy, technology or crisis reaches different people differently. A response that has not accounted for that is not merely unfair; it is usually less effective and harder to defend. Those differences are produced by context and by the relations between institutions, resources, identity and power, and they have to be taken up at the design stage rather than at delivery.

Power and participation decide what a response can achieve

Gender, inclusion and justice are not an annex to research or innovation. They determine who can take part, who has access, whose knowledge is treated as evidence, and how benefits and burdens end up distributed. They shape what gets noticed and how the problem is framed in the first place. Keeping that in view means examining, repeatedly, how power and access are shaping the process, the evidence and the range of outcomes still available.

Where exclusion gets built in

  • Participation and representation

    Considering who is present in research, design and decision-making, and how different forms of participation can have real influence.

  • Access and opportunity

    Examining barriers to services, institutions, technology and opportunity, including how those barriers are experienced across intersecting differences.

  • Power and distribution

    Looking at how policy, programmes and innovation distribute resources, risks, recognition and decision-making power.

  • Inclusive research and design

    Using context-sensitive inquiry and co-creation to make assumptions visible and keep agency central to the work.

Questions of access, representation and justice can run through public policy, technology and the futures shaped for younger generations.

Who is affected, and who is in the room

Two questions open this up: who is affected, and which of the people affected you can currently hear from.

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