The Australian Gender Economics Workshop (AGEW) is a premier conference dedicated to advancing gender economics in Australia.

Now in its ninth year, AGEW is held in collaboration with the Women in Economics Network (WEN), and brings together a diverse mix of scholars and policymakers from both Australia and abroad.

The event will feature a combination of academic paper presentations, a capacity-building workshop, and a policy symposium, providing opportunities for knowledge exchange and collaboration across research and policy domains.

The program will present cutting-edge research on gender-related economic issues and encourage meaningful dialogue between academics and policy practitioners.

AGEW’s primary objective is to build a vibrant research community committed to strengthening the evidence base that supports more gender-equitable policy and social outcomes.

Keynote speakers

Professor Manisha Shah, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Prof Shah is an applied microeconomist with a particular interest in health, education, and gender in low- and middle-income countries. The overarching goal of her research agenda is to identify policies and interventions to improve the lives of the global poor.

She has written several foundational papers on the economics of sex markets to learn how more effective policies and programs can be deployed to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Prof Shah also studies the impacts of policies to increase child and adolescent human capital investment in low-income settings.

Her research often involves primary data collection, and she has conducted field research in Tanzania, Uganda, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Indonesia, and India.  Shah has been supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the World Bank, and the National Science Foundation among others.

Prof Shah has research appointments at NBER, BREAD, IZA, J-PAL, and CEGA.  She has won teaching and research awards, and currently serves as an editor at the Journal of Health Economics, an associate editor at The Review of Economics and Statistics, and is on the editorial board at the American Economic Review.  Prior to joining Goldman, Prof Shah was the inaugural recipient of the Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Chair in Social Justice at UCLA and founding director of the Global Lab for Research in Action. She earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2006 and an MSc from the London School of Economics in 1997.

Professor Stefania Albanesi, University of Miami

Prof Albanesi is Professor of Economics at the Miami Herbert Business School, University of Miami, a Research Associate at the NBER and a CEPR Research Fellow.

She is a macroeconomist whose research interests include the determinants and implications of various dimensions of inequality and the distributional implications of government policies. Prior to her appointment to the University of Miami, she was a professor at Bocconi University, Duke University, Columbia University, University of Pittsburgh and a Research Officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She also held visiting positions at NYU-Stern, the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University and Princeton University, and was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Prof Albanesi has studied the political economy of inflation, the optimal taxation of capital and labor income, and the evolution of gender disparities in labor market outcomes. Her recent work has studied the distribution of debt and defaults in the lead up and during the 2007-09 financial crisis and the determinants and consequences of personal bankruptcy. Her current research focuses on the relation between changing trends in female participation and aggregate business cycles and on the relation between credit scores and equitable access to consumer credit markets. Prof Albanesi completed her PhD in economics at Northwestern University and has a bachelor's degree in economics from Bocconi University.

Registration is now by invitation only. If you haven’t received an invitation to register, please contact the organisers to request an invitation before paying the registration fee. Due to limited capacity, priority will be given to workshop presenters and discussants.

REGISTER NOW VIA THE AGEW2026 WEBSITE