Building Inclusive Workplaces

Ameeta Jaga serves as Professor of Organisational Psychology and Deputy Dean for Transformation and Inclusion in the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, where she has established herself as a leading expert in work-family research with a focus on gender equality and social justice. After transitioning from corporate human resources to academia in 2009, she has built an extraordinary career examining workplace dynamics through a southern theoretical lens. Her groundbreaking research on breastfeeding in South African workplaces revealed critical insights into gender equality challenges, particularly among low-income mothers. As a C2-rated researcher with the South African National Research Foundation and non-resident fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, she champions the decolonization of knowledge production while maintaining active research collaborations across the globe. Her recent work examines COVID-19's effects on work-family balance from a Global South perspective, while her participatory action research has influenced Western Cape Department of Health policies on workplace breastfeeding support. Through her leadership roles at UCT, including her identification as one of 10 women academics in UCT's future Research Leaders Program, she continues to advance understanding of work-family dynamics while maintaining her commitment to social justice and transformation in South African academia.