Against the Erasure of Gender: Refocusing Gender, Work and Organization for Sociologically Ambitious, Methodologically Plural, and Policy-Relevant Scholarship

Gender is being unmade as a category of public knowledge. We observe that across different political and institutional contexts, gender is being erased, redefined, or rendered less visible in law, policy, statistics, and organizational practice. In the United States, for example, the Trump administration has sought to institutionalize a binary conception of biological sex and dismantle federal gender and DEI infrastructures (The White House 2025). In the United Kingdom, the 2025 Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act has similarly intensified the institutional separation of sex from gender identity (UK Supreme Court 2025). Elsewhere in the world, political and organizational struggles over gender are taking different forms, from constitutional efforts to entrench binary definitions of sex to the retrenchment of workplace diversity initiatives. Even though these developments are not uniform, they do signal an increasingly consequential struggle over the categories through which gendered relations and inequalities are named, counted, governed, and challenged. Official data are stripped of it, policy reduces sex to two boxes, and in workplaces and organizations these developments become often painfully tangible for women, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.
Against this backdrop and in this editorial, we argue that Gender, Work and Organization should meet this moment by deepening its scholarship rather than retreating. Our aim with this editorial is not simply to document this retreat, but to articulate what gender and organization scholarship can do in response We set out four directions for contributions: recovering sociological structure; opening the machine-encoding of the binary; counting intersectionally without collapsing; and developing feminist methods that reveal what official data conceal. Each asks how such work can reach policy and practice.