A Fair Society

These research projects support inequalities research based on gender, race, ethnicity (including Indigenous studies), modern slavery, social and economic impact of policy, equity in higher education, governance (including financial, information and corporate), human rights, financial literacy and planning, unheard consumers, inter-cultural research, legal research.

Our Projects

FBL Research projects that support A Fair Society

Optimizing benefits of cultural diversity in Australian healthcare sector.

Investigators: Piyush Sharma, Russel Kingshott, Amy Tian and Julia Backmann

Optimizing benefits of cultural diversity in Australian healthcare sector. Australian society and workplaces are increasingly becoming culturally diverse with growing numbers of immigrants from culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) backgrounds. However, it is not clear to what extent this diversity is being harnessed to improve organisational performance by leveraging the diverse range of knowledge and skills of CaLD customers and employees. This project aims to use social identity theory and role theory to develop a comprehensive conceptual model for the process by which organisations identify, acknowledge, engage, accept, and adapt to cultural and linguistic diversity among their customers and employees. We also plan to test this model with data from customers and employees in Australian service sector.

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council.


ARC Centre of Excellence for The Elimination of Violence Against Women, Curtin node.

Investigators: Astghik Mavisakalyan

Eliminating violence against women is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. Awareness of the problem has grown exponentially, but solutions to it have not. This Centre aims to transform our understanding of the problem by examining the structural drivers that cause and compound violence against women, and pioneering new, evidence-based approaches to radically improve policy and practice across Australia and the Indo-Pacific. The Centre mobilises survivor-centric and Indigenous methodologies, interdisciplinary collaborations, and Indo-Pacific partnerships to deliver scalable approaches to eliminate violence against women across the legal, security, economic, health, and political systems of Australia and the region.

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council.


Home Ownership and Housing Wealth: Ageing and Intergenerational Pathways.

Investigators: Rachel Ong ViforJ

This project plans to fill major research gaps by delivering new evidence on the drivers of intergenerational housing wealth inequality. It aims to generate new knowledge on the ways in which baby boomers manage housing wealth, and shed light on their experiences of using wealth transfers to improve their children’s housing outcomes. The project offers innovative cross-national analyses that should produce internationally relevant findings and foster collaborations on a significant scale. It is expected to provide major national benefits by promoting a shift away from short-term policy planning that unintentionally set generations against each other towards a more holistic policy perspective that meet the needs of co-existing generations.

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council.

Our Priority SDGs

We are prioritising research outcomes in the Faculty of Business and Law to align with our priority SDGs.

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Reduce inequality within and among countries

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels