Shereen Hussein

Shereen's core work is on work and employment particularly within the human service and emotional labour. She is a interdisciplinary researcher formally trained in demography, sociology and statistics with significant expertise in labour-migration and social policy research. Her main research revolves around the work dynamics of the long term care (LTC) workforce and how these are implicated by wider policy directions, population changes and migration.

Shereen has a significant scholarly record publishing in journals such as Work, Employment and Society; Journal of Gender Studies; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; Journal of Racial Studies; Journal of Social Policy; Ageing and Society; Journal of Applied Gerontology; European Journal of Ageing; Aging and Mental Health and social work domain journals including British Journal of Social Work, the European Journal of Social Work and Research on Social Work Practice among others.

Shereen has previously worked with the UNICEF, United Nations, the Population Council, the World Bank, and the League of Arab States. Shereen has conducted research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region on social determinants of maternal and child health and then on social networks, marriage and family formation.She has led research in the policy implications of ageing populations across the world (including Australia, Turkey and Oman) and the diversity in the experience of ageing across different sectors of the British society with a focus on the impact of race and migration.

Shereen has driven the agenda of utilising existing large datasets to enhance research evidence in the field of care work research. At an early stage of this programme of work, she has established the Social Care Workforce Periodical as an outlet for practical examples of quantitative applications using domain-specific workforce data and produced 16 issues between 2009-2012. This programme of work was further developed to combine quantitative evidence with primary qualitative research to further investigate work issues such as the scale and reasons of poor pay in LTC; masculinity and entry to emotional work; migratory trajectories and destination/work choices.

She has developed a wider research agenda in work and employment including research examining the labour market penalties among Muslim women in Britain; older workers and volunteering at old age and the influences of past labour and work trajectories on older migrants’ ageing experience.  

Shereen’s research has generated significant policy and practice impact both nationally and internationally. For example, her research into poverty pay in the care sector, including research estimating the prevalence of non-compliance with the National Minimum Wage (NMW), was cited by the HMRC as the catalyst for their targeted sector-specific investigations in 2013. She has currently a member several advisory groups and has worked closely with Baroness Kingsmill in her review ‘Taking Care’, examining pay and working conditions in the care sector and she is currently being consulted on the Labour Market Enforcement Strategy (2018-2019) in relation to the care sector.  Similarly, she has been extensively consulted by Unions including Unison in their development of the Ethical Care Charter and the Australian Services Union in their response to the Australian Government NDIS Price Review.

Shereen is the network lead of ROWM, the Research On Workforce Mobility research network. Shereen sits on a number of governmental and non-governmental advisory boards and she is also an Adjunct Professor in Applied Statistics and Population Science at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.

Emotional labour; social service workforce; transnational professionals; migrant labour; men in women's work; organisational structures and job satisfaction/job-quitting; inequalities in ageing; feminised work; wages and labour participation; race and gender in work