Introduction

The contemporary Moroccan economic landscape positions gender functions as a dynamic force at the intersection of neoliberal aspirations and deep-seated patriarchal structures. While legislative milestones and digital initiatives have ostensibly paved the way for feminine economic participation, the entrepreneurial arena remains a contested site of power. This study examines how Moroccan women navigate the paradox of progress, where institutional visibility often conceals the persistence of traditional reproductive governance and socio-economic exclusion.

Methods

Adopting a qualitative relational framework, this research utilized semi-structured interviews with 17 women entrepreneurs across varied sectors in three Moroccan regions. The authors employed intersectional thematic analysis to explore how variables of financial autonomy, family obligations and digital literacy influence women’s ability to bridge the gender divide and establish professional legitimacy.

Results

The findings indicated a progressive increase in Moroccan female-led startups and cooperatives. Entrepreneurship-promoting programs have contributed to reinforcing women’s economic contribution and enhancing their social status. Nevertheless, this study highlighted the persistence of several barriers that undermined the newly forged avenues for autonomy. These barriers included disproportionate burdens of domestic care, systematic skepticism from society, and a glass labyrinth of informal male-centric business networks that dictated and managed market access.

Conclusions

This study concludes that women’s entrepreneurship in Morocco is not merely an economic activity but a form of social activism that challenges the gendered status quo. The Moroccan entrepreneurial ecosystem needs to reflect on means to operate a genuine social transformation that transcends mere inclusion mechanisms. Women’s entrepreneurship requires a radical restructuring of their intersectional realities to dismantle the structural inequalities that remain embedded in the routines of their everyday economic life.

This study aims to explore gender and familial relations in the power structure in Chinese Pentecostalism. Since its emergence in North America in the early twentieth century, Pentecostalism, a form of Christianity with a distinctive emphasis onSpirit-filled/empowered religious experiences, has rapidly grown in the Global South. What surprises scholars is the formation and development of the interdisciplinary study of Pentecostalism worldwide, which is now known as Pentecostal studies. In particular, gender has long been a debated theme in global Pentecostal scholarship.

One of the dominant discourses is Bernice Martin’s thesis of the Pentecostal gender paradox, which points out an ambiguity of gender’s role in shaping patriarchy, empowerment, and domestication in the Pentecostal ecclesiastical power relations, particularly evident in the Global South. However, the theoretical transferability of this thesis to the case of Chinese Pentecostalism remains doubtful. The question of how Chinese sociocultural contextuality shapes and reshapes gender and familial relations in Chinese Pentecostalism remains ambiguous and thus needs to be addressed.

This study adopts a five-year ethnography of Chinese Pentecostal churches in Hong Kong through participant observation, formal interviews, casual conversations, and the collection and analysis of literature. The study is grounded in the interpretative sociological framework of social Confucianism, informed by Ambrose Yeo-Chi King. The author argues that this sociocultural contextuality plays a critical role in shaping the power relations in Chinese Pentecostal churches. This study also challenges the inherent interpretation of the Pentecostal ecclesiastical power structure through the lens of gender and argues for a contextual interpretation of the Pentecostal ecclesiastical power relations that emphasizes symbolic paternalism through a symbolic familial lens. This study envisages contributing to the social scientific study of Pentecostalism by revisiting the existing Pentecostal theory and adopting the Chinese sociological theory that sheds light on the possibility of a new interpretation.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious social issue that affects many women and creates significant challenges in their married lives. Several factors contribute to IPV, including substance abuse, poverty, economic stress, gender inequality, patriarchal cultural norms, changing gender roles, a history of violence, aggressive behavior, and personality disorders. Among these factors, economic dependency plays a significant role in limiting women’s ability to resist or escape abusive relationships. This study focuses on the economic factors—such as lack of job opportunities, unemployment, and financial instability—that contribute to women’s economic dependency in Turbat, Balochistan. The research adopts a qualitative approach, using a descriptive research design to explore women’s lived experiences of intimate partner violence. Data were collected through in-depth interviews using open-ended questions with married women aged 18 years and above. The findings reveal that many women in Turbat experience IPV due to a patriarchal social structure that reinforces women’s dependency on their husbands. Economic dependency, combined with limited social support systems, prevents many women from speaking out against abusive behavior. The study highlights that many Baloch women remain in abusive relationships because financial insecurity restricts their ability to leave. The findings emphasize the need for initiatives that promote women’s economic independence, raise awareness through digital platforms, and provide confidential reporting mechanisms for victims of IPV. Additionally, there is a need for programs that challenge harmful gender norms and promote equal power dynamics in relationships.

The emergence of social media as a dominant platform for communication and information sharing has profoundly influenced the ways individuals interact, express opinions, and construct social identities. However, these platforms have also become sites for the proliferation of hate speech, including gendered forms of verbal abuse that target both women and men. Historically, research on gendered hate speech has overwhelmingly focused on women as primary victims, often overlooking the experiences of men as targets of similar discursive attacks. This gap highlights the need for a critical discourse analysis that explores the discourse strategies underpinning gendered hate speech against men. The theoretical framework used in the analysis of this study is Teun A. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis uses both quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis. The data were collated from selected social media platforms in Nigeria, like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok, between January 2020 and December 2025. Using purposive sampling, a total of one hundred and fifty-five (155) posts, comments, and videos containing explicit hate speech against men were selected through keyword searches and the manual browsing of content. This study identified 17 discourse strategies used in constructing gendered hate speech, and they include explicit hostility, blame shifting, dehumanization, evidentiality, victimization, positive self-representation, denial, etc. In conclusion, this study provides insights into how gendered hate speech against men is constructed, circulated, and legitimized on social media in Nigeria.

Introduction: Ageing is a biological process, but its meaning is socially constructed through cultural narratives that assign value and visibility. In contemporary societies, the "positive ageing" paradigm coexists with a coercive demand for eternal youth. This study examines The Substance (2024) as a cultural case study of gendered ageism and the social regulation of ageing female bodies.

Methods: A qualitative sociological analysis was conducted through a critical close reading of the film. The interpretation is guided by narrative gerontology, the notion of erotic capital (Hakim) to address the market value attached to female appearance, and the concept of abjection (Kristeva) to analyse the ageing body as a site of cultural anxiety. Analytical attention focused on four dimensions: (1) ageing as cultural construction, (2) the metanarrative of decline, (3) the individualisation of "positive ageing", and (4) gendered invisibility and aesthetic labour.

Results: The film depicts ageing not merely as a loss of status, but as the devaluation of the female body within appearance-centred cultural industries. It illustrates how "positive ageing" operates as a moralised form of self-management in which later life is framed as a personal failure to maintain desirability. A gendered double standard is intensified: while older men remain culturally legible, older women are rendered invisible unless they conform to restrictive youth norms through continuous bodily intervention.

Conclusions: The Substance foregrounds ageism as a structural form of gendered inequality. Challenging it requires deconstructing the narratives that equate ageing with a loss of value and expanding social spaces where growing older does not imply exclusion or the rendering of the ageing female body as monstrous.

This paper examines how gendered time burdens shape women’s economic outcomes in Kenya, using a gender economics lens that links unpaid care work to labour-market inequality and constrained asset accumulation. Drawing on secondary data from the 2021 Kenya Time Use Survey, the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, and the World Bank Gender Data Portal, this study applies descriptive and comparative gender-gap analysis to assess disparities in unpaid care, labour-force participation, employment quality, land ownership, and financial inclusion. The results show persistent structural inequalities. Kenya’s time-use data indicate that unpaid domestic and care work remains heavily feminised, with women contributing far more unpaid care hours than men; the national household satellite account estimates 25.8 billion hours for women compared with 4.8 billion hours for men in 2021. Labour-market indicators similarly reveal disadvantages: in 2024, female labour-force participation stood at 62.2% versus 71.4% for males, and women were more concentrated in vulnerable employment (73.6% versus 56.4%) and less represented in wage and salaried work (25.6% versus 42.6%). Asset gaps persist as well, with 75.2% of women aged 15–49 reporting no land ownership compared with 66.4% of men, although financial inclusion has improved, with account ownership reaching 86.5% for women and 93.9% for men in 2024. These findings suggest that gender inequality in Kenya is reproduced not only through wages and employment status but also through unequal time allocation and weaker command over productive assets. This study concludes that care-sensitive macro and labour policies, expanded access to decent work, and stronger women’s property rights are central to inclusive growth and women’s economic empowerment in Kenya.

After September 11, 2001 and in more recent years (the Trump Era), Muslim people and communities have been subject to unique threats of discrimination, surveillance, and violence, as a result of stigmatization. Muslim women encounter gender-based violence at the axes of multiple marginalizations which informs contemporary notions of Islamophobia. Gender-based violence and harassment of Muslim women in public spaces continue to be linked to hypervisibility (veiling), yet ‘invisible’ (non-veiled) Muslim women are also susceptible to gendered anti-Muslim assaults in the public sphere. Drawing from an exploratory qualitative study that examined the perceptions of Muslim women (n= 27) across racial, ethnic, and immigrant identity during the first Trump Administration in the US, findings indicate that Muslim women in the US navigate public spaces from a unique intersectional position where they encounter a spectrum of interpersonal violence including social surveillance, physical violence, and verbal assaults. Because these experiences are shaped by racialized gender norms and perceptions of Muslims as perpetual foreigners (immigrants), findings center how Muslim women resist normalized violence by embracing protective measures and increased participation in civic engagement. Thus, Muslim women negotiating their existence in society highlights the double bind they face that shapes experiences of invisible victimization and informs understandings of intragender interpersonal harassment.

This article examines how gender is constructed, negotiated, and reproduced through local narratives in the thematic villages of Malang City, Indonesia. Drawing on qualitative research within the framework of feminist theory and gender studies, this study explores storytelling as a gendered social practice embedded in everyday community life and local cultural production. Using in-depth interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis of oral and visual narratives, this research investigates how stories told by community members articulate, legitimize, and sometimes contest gender roles, identities, and power relations within village spaces shaped by tourism and creative initiatives. The findings reveal that storytelling functions both as a site of gender reinforcement—where normative femininity and masculinity are reiterated and naturalized—and as a space of negotiation, particularly through women’s narratives that subtly or explicitly challenge dominant representations. Thematic villages, while frequently promoted as sites of cultural creativity, economic empowerment, and participatory development, also operate as gendered spaces in which narrative authority is unevenly distributed and certain voices are selectively amplified or marginalized. By foregrounding local narratives as analytical entry points, this study highlights the role of storytelling in shaping gendered meanings of place, labor, belonging, and community identity. This article contributes to gender studies by demonstrating how localized narrative practices provide critical insights into the everyday production, regulation, and transformation of gender beyond formal institutions, emphasizing the importance of narrative and place-based approaches in feminist qualitative research and community studies.

Achieving gender parity in global climate governance remains a crucial component of equitable and effective policymaking. Drawing on the Gender Composition Report 2025 (FCCC/CP/2025/4) prepared by the UNFCCC Secretariat, this paper analyses official data from COP 29 (CMP 19/CMA 6) and the subsidiary body sessions (SB 62) to assess progress toward gender balance in climate decision-making. The findings reveal incremental but measurable improvement: women accounted for 37.8 per cent of Party delegates at COP 29—an increase of 1.8 percentage points compared with 2024—and 32.3 per cent of heads and deputy heads of delegation, representing a 4.8-percentage-point gain. Notably, the SB 62 June sessions achieved full gender balance among Party delegates, with 53.2 per cent female representation. Across UNFCCC constituted bodies, 7 of 17 achieved gender balance, and overall female representation averaged 40 per cent—up from 39 per cent in 2024. Two case studies embedded in the report underscore a broader trend toward inclusivity: gender-balanced side-event panels rose from 20 per cent (COP 26) to 39 per cent (COP 29), while comparable subsidiary-body panels increased from 28 per cent (SB 56) to 53 per cent (SB 62). Together, these patterns indicate that institutional commitments—such as the enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender and its Gender Action Plan—are translating into measurable gains. The paper situates these developments within social-science frameworks of gender equity, representation, and global policy learning, with particular emphasis on progress in the Global South.

Hegemonic masculinity is a form of masculinity that serves to legitimize and protect men's dominant position in society by establishing superiority over women and other masculinities (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). It is defined by being heterosexual, anti-effeminite and anti-gay (Özbay, 2013). Therefore, for a man to possess an acceptable form of masculinity in a culture where same-sex desire is equated with femininity, he must be anti-homosexual. This pressure leads some gay men to engage in femiphobia (anti-effeminacy) and de-feminize themselves to avoid being seen as “less of a man”, or “like a woman”. (Eslen-Ziya & Koç, 2016; Taywaditep, 2002). Hegemonic masculinity is not solely an individual or cultural concept; it is constructed on three levels which influence each other. Hofstede's cultural dimensions can be a valuable framework to understand how hegemonic masculinity is experienced and enforced in a culture. In Türkiye, specifically dimensions of power distance, motivation towards success, and uncertainty avoidance can be used to understand how hegemonic masculinity is experienced by queer men. This study examines the construction and maintenance of hegemonic masculinity on the primarily used gay dating app (Hornet) in Türkiye through qualitative discourse analysis on 193 user profiles from seven different cities. Emerging themes were “Ideal Masculinity”, “Sexual Role and Hierarchy" and “Secrecy and Respectability”, which are interpreted through the lens of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions. The findings demonstrate that hegemonic masculinity survives within queer spaces not by denying homosexuality, but reshaping it into forms that remain compatible with patriarchal, heteronormative, and culturally sanctioned notions of masculinity.