Recent and substantial 'reforms' have significantly amended the 1996 Workplace Relations Act (Cth) and 'Welfare-to-Work' regimes. These reforms have renewed the focus on gender at work, in the community at large, and among academics. However, the solid scholarship that exists on gender and work done in Australia has been in two separate disciplinary areas - feminist public policy scholarship, and feminist industrial relations scholarship - with little integration to date of the joint insights of this work. The purpose of this article is therefore to ask 'can industrial relations scholars gain new insights into industrial relations by examining the work of feminist public policy scholars'? If so, what are those insights?