The Annual Mary McAleese Diversity Lecture 2025 - Prof Fang Lee Cooke

You are warmly invited to the Queen’s Business School Annual Mary McAleese Diversity Lecture in association with the Business Engagement at Queen’s. 

This year’s lecture is titled ‘Towards a more inclusive approach to advancing gender equality: Extending feminist scholarship in the global context’, with guest speaker Professor Fang Lee Cooke. 

About the Lecture

Advancing gender equality is a universal principle and endeavour to promote social justice for all genders. How we go about it and what outcomes can be achieved and need to be achieved are shaped by societal, sectoral, organizational and individual contexts.

This lecture critically examines the shift from gender equality research to gender diversity research in the human resource management (HRM) field, which is increasingly framed from a business case perspective, and calls for a return to a social justice approach. It also critically examines the dominant perspective in feminist scholarship, which remains Western-centric, and its inadequacy in addressing gender equality issues in non-Western settings.

The lecture explores how we can move forward to reshape the field of gender equality research into a more inclusive one with diverse voices, epistemologies, and theorization that are reflective of local challenges, conditions, struggles, and progress. It also discusses implications for management education, postgraduate research training, and journal editorship.

About the Speaker

Fang Lee Cooke is a distinguished Professor at Monash Business School, Monash University, Australia.

Her research interests include strategic HRM, international HRM, gender equality, diversity and inclusion management, migration and employment, social justice and labour productivity, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the role of firms. Fang Lee Cooke’s recent research projects examine some of the tensions, challenges and implications associated with these topics for various key stakeholders such as the state, employers’ associations, trade unions, workers, and non-government organizations.

Fang Lee Cooke is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Human Resource Management and was an Associate Editor of Gender, Work & Organization and a Regional Editor of Gender in Management: An International Journal. Fang Lee Cooke received the Dean’s Award for PRME Research Excellence (2018) and the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (2011), Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, Australia.

Fang Lee Cooke was a panel member of the United Nations Environment Programme-International Sciences Council (UNEP-ISC), Foresight Expert Panel (2023-2024), and is a member of the Research Review Panel, International Labour Organization (2024-).

About the Lecture Series 

In June 2019, former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, formally launched the Queen’s Business School Annual Mary McAleese Diversity Lecture Series during an event at the University.

The lecture series is part of Queen’s Business School’s mission to promote greater equality and diversity in the workplace, particularly with regards to ensuring equality of opportunity and respect for diversity across the University and the wider community. 

About Mary McAleese 

Mary McAleese, who is a Professor of Children, Law and Religion at the University of Glasgow, discussed female empowerment, same sex marriage, misogyny and homophobia during the course of the event. 

A barrister by profession, she graduated from the School of Law at Queen’s in 1973 and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1974. She was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin the following year and later took up the position of Director of the Institute of Legal Studies at Queen’s in 1987. Professor McAleese became the University’s first female Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 1994. 

Mary McAleese was elected the 8th President of Ireland in November 1997, succeeding Mary Robinson. She is the second female president.