Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

She received her doctorate, which was concerned with new racism and new sexism in British pop radio,[4] in social psychology from the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), Loughborough University in 1991.

In an interview, she has identified Michael Billig (her PhD supervisor) and Stuart Hall as major influences[5] and, together with Christina Scharff, she dedicated the book New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity to Angela McRobbie.

[10] One of Gill's most significant theoretical contributions is her discussion of postfeminism, which she claims is "one of the most important and contested terms in the lexicon of feminist cultural analysis".

[12] In a highly cited article in European Journal of Cultural Studies (ECJS) in 2007, Gill argued that postfeminism should be thought of as a contemporary “sensibility”, shaped by neoliberalism and “by stark and continuing inequalities” related to gender race and class.

In later work she looked at other media environments that explicitly marked themselves as ‘cool, creative and egalitarian’[16] showing the novel forms that sexism took in such sites.

[17] This work challenges debates centred on maternity as the primary reason for women’s underrepresentation in cultural and creative fields, and pointed to the need to explore the flexibility and dynamism of sexism as a set of practices.

Gill consistently argued for the need to dialogue across differences and to think critically about the cultural processes gathered under the heading “sexualisation” with greater attention to specificities of power and identity.

[20] Gill’s research has included a large-scale qualitative study of men’s experiences of a visual culture increasingly dominated by idealised representations of the male body.

[25] In 2012, Rosalind Gill worked with Jessica Ringrose, Sonia Livingstone and Laura Harvey on and NSPCC-funded research project about “sexting”, focused on listening to young people’s experiences of mobile communications and image sharing.

The research was published as a report,[26] several articles,[27][28] and was also used as the basis of a play titled Sket, written by Maya Sondhi, which premiered at London’s Park Theatre in 2016, directed by Prav MJ.

[30][31][32] Gill’s contribution has been to move beyond programmatic accounts of the “corporate university” or “new public management” and to explore the lived experience of working cultures marked by increasing precariousness, time pressure, and audit.