Her mother, Margaret Lloyd Connell (née Peck) was a high school science teacher.

[7] She was a rank-and-file member of the Australian Labor Party until the early 1980s and a trade unionist, currently in the National Tertiary Education Union.

In applied fields she has worked on poverty and education,[20] sexuality and AIDS prevention, and labour movement strategy.

[21] Connell and Messerschmidt collaborated on a piece, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” 2005,[22] in response to scepticism that the outcome of her theory creates a fixed typology.

One gender cannot be examined in isolation from another and emphasizes that there are disparities among males, even though neither one chooses the Postmodern practice of completely undermining this concept.

Hegemonic masculinity, a theory developed by Raewyn Connell, has had a significant impact on feminist sociology.

In their critique of the sex-role theory,[25] Connell and her co-authors claim that the emphasis on internalized norms, attitudes, and behaviours of society obscures structural inequalities and power dynamics and misrepresents the gendering process.

Gender role expectations exist in every country, ethnic group, and culture, although they can vary greatly among them.

[27] She has been an advisor to UNESCO and UNO initiatives relating men, boys and masculinities to gender equality and peacemaking.

Her 2007 book Southern Theory extended this to the global dynamics of knowledge production, critiquing the "Northern" bias of mainstream social science which is predominately produced in "metropolitan[28]" universities.

She continues to argue in these contexts that historical power differentiations are maintained through imperialistic privileging of thought and that decolonizing this construction of knowledge can revolutionize societies across the globe.