Gender and Precarity in Academia

From the 1970s onwards, global neoliberal economic and political processes began to stem into the global labour market. The process of neoliberalisation has fundamentally changed the nature of work and working conditions, adding to the growing uncertainty of the labour market. These processes have played a major role in shaping the global class structure, with the relatively rapid emergence of a new group, the precariat, comprising millions of workers with precarious employment conditions. The precariat is a class or group that is still being formed today (class-in-the-making), and their members typically "have precarious jobs, without a sense of occupational identity or career in front of them, they have no social memory on which to draw, no shadow of the future hanging over their relationships, and have a limited and precarious range of rights".
Precarious employment is a result of the intersection of the increasing number of insecure jobs in labour markets, unsupportive environments at workplaces, and vulnerable employees who were already vulnerable or have become more vulnerable under insecure working conditions