Over the last decades, higher education and research systems have been characterized by deep changes, due to globalization and marketization, that have dramatically transformed research careers. While doctoral and postdoctoral researchers constitute a fast-growing workforce, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious and their career prospects uncertain. Those processes tend to exacerbate and create new forms of gendered inequalities for Early Career Researchers (ECRs), first and foremost women – that have been magnified by the COVID-19 crisis (Gewin, 2020). Those inequalities are also reinforced by disparities within academia linked to other social determinants, such as origin, race, citizenship, geographic location, socioeconomic status, sexuality, or ability. The main goal of this panel is thus to explore inequalities faced by ECRs from a gender perspective and to analyze existing and forthcoming possible dialogues between ECRs and stakeholders in the research ecosystem at the systemic level (policy-makers) and the institutional level (senior researchers, academic managers). Here are some topics we would like to address in the panel : – How to enforce policies that ensure better career prospects and career development within and outside academia and to assess their effectiveness and impact? – How to better integrate ECRs and their interests into decision-making bodies? – How to tackle gender-based violence at the early career stage within academia, and to disrupt current sexist discourses? – How to introduce an intersectional analysis to research policies to account for a more complex understanding of how inequalities play out at the early career stage?