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The purpose of this paper is to examine gender inequality in Saudi Arabia by using a relational perspective that takes into account the interrelated nature of the multilevel factors that influence this phenomenon.

A total of 21 in-depth interviews with female employees in Saudi Arabia were conducted and analysed using a thematic analysis.

The findings show how the interplay of factors on macro, meso and micro levels influences equal opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia, such as religio-cultural factors, the social power of wasta, the notions of female modesty and family honour and issues related to gender segregation, discrimination and harassment at work. Moreover, Saudi women’s experiences are varied on the basis of social class, family status and other dimensions of individual identity, adding to a growing body of intersectional research. The paper highlights the role of male guardianship system as well as the intersection of gender and class in pushing gender equality forward.

This study stresses the interrelated nature of the multilevel factors that affect gender equality and highlights the important role of individual agency and resilience.

This article examines the labour market inclusion of documented and undocumented Afghan refugees in Pakistan using and extending Bourdieu's theory of capital.

The authors draw on 22 semi-structured in-depth interviews with both documented and undocumented Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

The findings show the low capital endowments of refugees. Their economic capital is shaped by low levels of financial resources, and emotional capital is shaped by their psychological distress and traumata and identity capital takes the form of negative perceptions about them. Their low capital endowments are further reduced through different forms of symbolic violence, such as ambiguous and short-term government policies, bribery and abuse by the police as well as unfair treatment by employers. However, refugees do mobilise their capital endowments to enhance their labour market position. The authors identified resilience as emotional capital, their strategic development of who they are as identity capital as well as social and cultural capital in the form of ethnic and linguistic similarities with locals in finding ways to improve their inclusion in the labour market.

The authors provide insights in the dynamics that lead to and sustain the exclusion and inequalities faced by Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

This study aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19 concerns on employees’ well-being, considering workplace stress, aggression, and emotional outcomes, such as emotional engagement, emotional exhaustion, and negative emotional reactions. This study also considers the moderating role of technostress between workplace stress and aggression, which has been overlooked in previous studies.

Data were collected from frontline hotel employees in Turkey. Online data were collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk services. A total of 250 questionnaires were distributed. Nevertheless, only 204 questionnaires with valid responses were usable for analysis through partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The analytical findings showed that COVID-19 concerns (financial, social gaze, and technological) cause workplace stress, resulting in aggression. Aggression subsequently affects the employees’ emotional outcomes, impacting their emotional well-being. Furthermore, the results showed that technostress insignificantly moderates workplace stress and aggression.

This study provides valuable practical implications to the hotels’ top management, practitioners, and policymakers to provide preventive measures to employees, such as wearing masks and maintaining distance. Hotel practitioners should limit employees’ direct contact with customers and reduce factors that result in overall financial losses and create financial stress for employees.

The current study examined the relationships between the study’s variables in Turkey’s hotel industry context by employing the conservation of resources (COR) theory. The study investigated stress and aggression phenomena, their impact on employees’ emotional responses, and ultimately their influence on the employees’ well-being.

Informed by a relational theorisation of equal opportunity, this paper seeks to focus on multi‐level experiences and observations of women working in Pakistan's formal employment sector considering issues and challenges facing them at three levels of analysis, i.e. macro‐societal, meso‐organisational and micro‐individual.

Drawing on in‐depth qualitative interviews with 30 working women in Lahore, the paper examines multi‐level issues of women working in Pakistani organisations.

The study reveals that focusing exclusively on organisations and holding them solely accountable for equal opportunity may be inadequate as organisational structures and routines of equal opportunity are affected by both macro‐societal factors (e.g. legal, socio‐cultural) and micro‐individual factors (e.g. intersectionality, agency). In particular, the study highlights unique socio‐cultural and structural challenges facing working women in Pakistan and the ways in which these women are able to negotiate and overcome some of these challenges.

The study is based on six Pakistani organisations located in Lahore, Punjab, and may not be generalized to represent issues and challenges of equal opportunity in other provinces of Pakistan.

The paper suggests that employers may pay special attention to socio‐cultural issues facing women to promote gender equality at the workplace.

The study contributes to the equal employment opportunity literature by exploring gender equality issues in a Muslim majority country's context.

The aim of this paper is to examine contextual emotional labor, which is a long‐term emotional experience in response to conflicting demands of societal and organizational contexts.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with Muslim female employees in two textile firms in Lahore, Pakistan, the paper explores the nature and extent of contextual emotional labor associated with these women's decision to step into “the male domain”.

The study identifies contextual emotional labor as an integral part of Muslim female employees' work in the formal employment sector resulting from an ongoing tension between the display rules of the workplace and Islamic female modesty.

Scholars may wish to investigate the nature and form of contextual emotional labor in diverse geographic, cultural and religious contexts in order to refine the findings and theoretical implications of this study.

Organizations may consider placing Muslim women in those roles in which there is lesser likelihood of conflict between their organizational and societal display rules, while not compromising their career. On a societal level, policy makers and religious scholars may consider findings ways to promote an enlightened interpretation of religious principles and their gender egalitarian practices to alleviate the contextual emotional labor experiences by female employees and other relevant groups.

The paper offers original empirical research on an under‐explored topic and geographical area.

The present research aims to investigate the impact of “COVID-19 phobia” factors (psychological, social, economic and psychosomatic) on career anxiety and perceived distress. Further, this research assesses whether career anxiety and perceived distress foster or diminish students' employability confidence.

“Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM)” has been used to analyze the data.

The results depict that factors (psychological, economic and psychosomatic) are positively and significantly associated with career anxiety and perceived distress. However, social factors indicate an adverse impact on perceived distress. Further, career anxiety and perceived distress positively influence employability confidence, but the associations are not highly impactful.

This research elucidates an unexplored phenomenon in the context of a developing country that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) phobia scale (i.e. psychological, social, economic and psychosomatic) result in career anxiety and distress. Moreover, no studies highlighted the direct impact of career anxiety and perceived distress on employability confidence.

The purpose of this study was to assess the knowledge of head and neck cancers (HNCs), their risk factors, signs and symptoms among the general public of Karachi, Pakistan.

Initially, 503 individuals were approached for data collection, out of which 404 fit the inclusion criteria (response rate = 80.03%). Nonprobability convenience sampling was utilized to select participants who fell under the age group of 15–60 years, barring the fields of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelors of Surgery (MBBS) and Bachelors of Dentistry (BDS). Knowledge was evaluated by a 9-item questionnaire, the scores of which yielded the following interpretations: No (0), low (1–3), moderate (4–6) and high (7–9) knowledge.

Of the 404 participants who completed the questionnaire, 357 (88.4%) participants claimed to be aware of HNC. The HNC knowledge scores had a statistical relevance with socioeconomic status (p = <0.01) and level of education (p = 0.02). Most participants recognized a “lump or swelling in the throat” (87.1%) as the most common symptom, followed by “bleeding in mouth or throat” (84.7%). Surprisingly, 75.25% of participants thought HNCs were inclusive of brain cancer.

Overall, knowledge of HNCs among the general public of Karachi surpasses the knowledge in other regions around the world. Our study demonstrated that people indulge in unhealthy habits despite having sufficient knowledge and this warrants prompt interventions and counseling of the people.