Gendering Business and Human Rights

Intersectional Feminist Perspectives on Corporate Accountability
Research Workshop
12–13 November 2026 · Erlangen
Hosted by FAU CHREN, FAU Erlangen–Nürnberg and the European University Viadrina

Concept Note

Almost fifteen years after the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), corporate accountability frameworks still often overlook gendered and especially intersectional harms. Current due diligence approaches tend to focus on formal employment risks, while paying less attention to harms that disproportionately affect women, girls, queer, and gender-diverse persons and especially their intersections, including informal and reproductive labour, land dispossession, environmental violence, sexual and gender-based violence, and the weakening of community and care infrastructures.

These gaps cannot be solved simply by adding a “gender lens” to existing due diligence tools. They reflect deeper structural problems in how corporate harm and responsibility are understood. Although the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has called for a gender-transformative approach to the UNGPs, implementation remains limited, and feminist BHR scholarship is still fragmented across disciplines.

This workshop therefore asks how Business and Human Rights framework can be reimagined through feminist, intersectional, decolonial, and Global South perspectives. It takes place at a key moment, as diverse developments across the world, inter alia, the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG), the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), the EU Forced Labour Regulation, the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, proposed due diligence laws in South Korea and Thailand, as well as UN Binding Treaty negotiations are shaping the future of corporate accountability.

The workshop aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from law, social sciences, political economy, sustainability research, gender studies, information systems, and management studies to contribute to the foundations of an intersectional feminist BHR research agenda.

Format

The workshop is a closed, non-hierarchical space for discussing works-in-progress in facilitated sessions rather than formal panels. Papers will be pre-circulated, and each will be assigned a discussant. The workshop will also include a public evening keynote and roundtable, open to the FAU community, partner institutions, and the wider FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg public.

This event is funded by state funds of the Free State of Bavaria to support “Realisation of Equal Opportunities for Women in Research and Teaching” by the FAU Cluster of Excellence “Transformin Human Rights” and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) project “Beyond access – the potential of non-judicial grievance mechanisms to improve effective remedy for vulnerable groups in the field of Business and Human Rights”.

Please direct all queries to: otgontuya.davaanyam@fau.de

Full Programm (PDF)