Research in this domain has been quite diverse in terms of themes and disciplinary orientations. At present, there is cross disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary research that brings a gender perspective to bear on problems of labour, livelihoods, politics, health, migration and marriage. Gendered power relations were implicated even when not explicitly probed in the early research at the Centre (1970s) on questions of fertility transition and human development. Even as research in the 1980s and 1990s brought a clear focus on women’s work and employment, including the implications of wider definitions of work for computing national income, on women in agriculture and fisheries, and on understanding how women made good in the context of large scale male migration to the Middle East. The evolution of the CDS research agenda through critical engagement with earlier perspectives on development has been particularly marked in the case of the research on gender and caste since 2000. Gender in contemporary Kerala has been the focus of significant research. Recent research on gender and politics in Kerala has addressed decentralised governance, feminisation of local governance and student politics in higher educational institutions. Gendered livelihoods have come into focus in the context of self-help initiatives of women even as the persisting low female work participation in India and Kerala has continued to receive attention. There is ongoing work on state policy and the implication of gender and caste / religious identities in international migration of women workers from South India.