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Dr Lilith Brouwers

  • Position: Research Fellow in Gender and Work
  • Areas of expertise: Gendered labour, marginalised workers, informal work, women in gendered professions, hyper-precarity, labour mobility power, disabled informal workers, labour relations in sex work
  • Email: L.H.Brouwers@leeds.ac.uk
  • Website: Twitter | ORCID

Profile

As an interdisciplinary researcher of gender and work, I am interested in forms of labour that are often overlooked or under-studied from a labour perspective, such as gendered professions and sex work. With a background in interdisciplinary research methodology and gender research, my PhD at Leeds University Business School in Work and Employment Relations focused on the work relationships of full service sex workers. In addition to themes of gender and labour, I also explore informal work, hyper-precarity, agency use of marginalised workers, labour mobility power, and research ethics when researching marginalised groups.

If you are an academic or postgraduate researcher interested in joining the Sex Work and Labour research network, please get in touch with me.

Research interests

Currently I work on the ESRC funded project ’L-earning: rethinking young women's working lives’.  This project explores young women’s earliest experiences of work and how these experiences may contribute to gendered inequalities in later life. Within this project, I focus on the working experiences of women between the ages of 23 and 29 in professional, non-professional and self-employed roles in three gendered industries: Health & Social Care, Fashion & Beauty, and Childcare, Education and Youth Work. More information is on the project website.

My PhD research resulted in a report on the experiences of sex workers with third parties, including managers and colleagues, which was cited in the by the EU Human Rights Commissioner in her call for the full decriminalisation of sex work in Europe. In addition to research, I convene the Sex Work & Labour Network and run peer feedback sessions for the Disability Culture Research Network.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD in Work and Employment Relations, University of Leeds
  • MSc in Gender Research, London School of Economics and Political Sciences
  • BA in Genderstudies and Liberal Arts & Sciences, Utrecht University

Research groups and institutes

  • Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
  • Centre for Disability Studies