In 2023, two Life Course Centre researchers were named as the top researchers in the fields of Family and Gender studies by The Australian newspaper’s Research Magazine. This annual magazine celebrates excellence in Australian research by ranking the top researcher, and research institution, across 250 fields of research. The rankings are based on analytics by the League of Scholars that produce impact scores on the quality of publishing, and number of citations, in academic journals.
We were very proud to see our researchers receive this prominent national recognition in 2023 for the quality and impact of their academic publishing in the fields of family and gender studies, which are important topics of research for the Life Course Centre. However, our commitment to excellence and impact in these research fields is not just theoretical, it is also applied. This was demonstrated in 2023 in two key areas—lived experience and policy engagement.
Our Centre Director Professor Janeen Baxter (UQ) was named as the top researcher in the field of family studies, and UQ was also ranked as the top research institution in this field. Associate Investigator Professor Leah Ruppanner (Melbourne) was named as the top researcher in the field of gender studies and also in sociology, with the University of Melbourne also ranked as the top research institution in these fields.
Professor Janeen Baxter
Professor Leah Ruppanner
Lived Experience
Left to right: Professor Shelley Mallett, Director of Research and Policy Centre, Brotherhood of St. Laurence; Terese Edwards, CEO, National Council of Single Mothers and their Children; Agnieszka Nelson, Branch Manager, Families and Payment Support, Australian Government Department of Social Services; expert panel at the workshop Single parenting, co-parenting, and post-separation families: Challenges and opportunities in times of crisis co-hosted by the Life Course Centre and The Australian Sociological Association, Melbourne.
Integrating lived experience of disadvantage is an ongoing focus of our research, knowledge transfer and engagement activities. Our commitment to listening to, and learning from, lived experiences was showcased in our June 2023 workshop ‘Single parenting, co-parenting, and post-separation families: Challenges and opportunities in times of crisis’. This collaborative workshop in Melbourne brought together academics, community members, policy makers, industry partners and advocates to examine ways to better support single parents, who are overwhelmingly women, and their children.
A highlight of this workshop was hearing the stories of the four single mothers who took part in the lived experience panel, moderated by Terese Edwards, CEO of Single Mother Families Australia. This opportunity to hear directly from single mothers on the challenges they face, in particular their experiences in navigating the child and income support systems, grew out of our ongoing partnership with Anti-Poverty Week. Since 2021, this research partnership has focused on the gendered nature of poverty and structural inequalities for Australian women, including links between experiences of family violence and subsequent financial hardship.
In 2023, the Life Course Centre also established a new partnership with the Domestic Violence Action Centre (DVAC) on a project to explore the experience of survivors who have recently engaged with DVAC’s services. The knowledge generated through hearing directly from survivor experiences will not only contribute to academic scholarship on gender-based violence and how best to address it, but also inform future decision making on funding models and service design to more effectively support domestic violence survivors. Our researchers also published a Life Course Centre Working Paper in 2023 titled ‘Gender Trap: the gender structure, violence, and women’s unfreedom’.
The Life Course Centre followed up this research with a webinar presenting key findings from the Survivor Experiences Report with an expert panel.
Our partner, the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) was involved in our 2023 single parenting workshop, with Agnieszka Nelson, DSS Branch Manager, Families and Payment Support, featuring in the stakeholder panel discussion. Following the workshop, we provided a policy briefing to DSS highlighting the challenges for single mothers in the child support system, and the opportunities for new longitudinal data on child support to better support policy making. Our Centre Director Professor Janeen Baxter (UQ) was also invited by DSS to join a new expert panel to provide advice on improving the child support scheme, including financial support for single parents. Our research was also featured in the 2023 DSS Impact Analysis ‘Additional Support for Single Parents OIA23-04851’.
Victoria Anderson: Deputy Secretary, Commonwealth Treasury; Dr Barbara Broadway, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, the University of Melbourne; Dr Alice Campbell, Research Fellow, Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland; Dr Angela Jackson, Lead Economist, Impact Economics and Policy on the panel at the Public Economics Forum co-hosted by the Melbourne Institute and the Life Course Centre, Canberra.
In October 2023, we co-hosted a Public Economics Forum in Canberra with the Melbourne Institute on ‘Addressing Female Poverty: Causes and Solutions’. This event was well attended by government policy makers and featured presentations on our latest research on families and gender, including relationship breakdown, family violence and child support. Dr Angela Jackson, Lead Economist, Impact Economics and Policy, examined previous approaches and future recommendations for addressing female poverty, while a Q&A session moderated by Victoria Anderson, Deputy Secretary, Treasury, featured further discussions on violence, divorce and older women in poverty.
The Life Course Centre has also been actively engaged in consultation on the Australian Government’s White Paper on Jobs and Opportunities, released in September 2023. We provided a Centre submission to the White Paper during the public consultation phase in 2020, which led to a follow-up meeting between our researchers and Treasury. Our submission highlighted the barriers for women, particularly mothers, for employment, including current childcare and income support settings, and it was very pleasing to see a key White Paper objective focused on overcoming these barriers and broadening opportunities for women in the labour market. These objectives are also reflected in the 2023 report from the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce established by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
This page was printed at 2:10 pm on Friday, 24 Jul 2026.
Please see https://lifecoursecentre.org.au/impact/family-and-gender-studies/ for the latest version.
