Experts Meeting: Home and Engaged Fatherhood
Paper: The contradictory faces of fatherhood: from love and sacrifice to burnout and backsliding

Nikki van der Gaag is an independent gender consultant; a writer, speaker, researcher, activist, facilitator, and mentor. She specialises in work on unpaid care, and in particular on masculinities and men’s role in care. From 2016 to 2019 she was Director of Gender Justice and Women’s Rights at Oxfam GB. She is a Senior Fellow at Equimundo. From 2020-2024 she was a Steering Committee member of MenEngage Europe, part of the MenEngage Alliance, a global network working with men and boys in alliance with women’s rights and feminist organisations around the world. She was also a Board member of Make Mothers Matter which advocates for recognition and support of mothers as changemakers in the world (2020-2024). She has worked with a wide range of organisations;international non-governmental organisations, the corporate sector, small local NGOs, donor organisations and the media. She has authored six of Plan International State of the World’s Girls reports, and has been co-author on six State of the World's Fathers reports and lead author on the 2019 and 2023 editions. She has written several books – Feminism and Men (2014 Bloomsbury), the No-Nonsense guide to Feminism, (Verso 2015) and co-edited Patriarchy in Practice: Ethnographies of Everyday Masculinities with Amir Massoumiam and Dan Nightingale (2023, Routledge).