True received an MA from the University of Arizona, followed by a PhD from York University. She then was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, before joining the faculty at Michigan State University. She later moved to the University of Auckland, and then Monash University. She has also had visiting positions at the Australian National University and Gothenburg University. In addition to more than 100 articles in peer reviewed academic journals, True has been an author or editor of more than a dozen books. She has been the sole author of multiple books, including Gender, globalization, and postsocialism: The Czech Republic after communism. In her 2012 book, The political economy of violence against women, True addresses the apparent paradox that significant recent legislation around the world with the stated purpose of decreasing violence against women had not managed to substantially reduce the problem. She does so by studying what causes violence against women to occur in the first place, from the origins of domestic violence to war crimes targeting women. She develops an approach based on political economy. True argues that violence against women arises inextricably from inequality, poverty, and the gendered division of household labour, as well as broader phenomena like militarism. This provides an explanation for violence against women in terms of social and economic processes at the local, regional, and global levels, from violence at the home to the tendency for international financial crises to disproportionately affect the well-being of women. The book takes a feminist economic approach to the study of human rights using existing data, case studies, and new analyses. The political economy of violence against women won the Best Book Award from the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association in 2013, the 2013 International Political Economy Book Prize from the British International Studies Association, and the Australian Political Science Association's Carole Pateman book prize for gender and politics. It also received the annual book prize from the International Political Economy working group of the British International Studies Association, and was listed in the "best selling" section of the Book Authority list of the 100best selling gender studies books of all time. True is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. In 2018, True was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lund University. True's work has been cited, or she has been quoted, in media outlets like The New York Times, Ms., and The Christian Science Monitor.
Selected works
"Transnational networks and policy diffusion: The case of gender mainstreaming", International studies quarterly, with Michael Mintrom
Gender, globalization, and postsocialism: The Czech Republic after communism
Feminist methodologies for international relations, with Brooke A. Ackerly and Maria Stern
Doing feminist research in political and social science, with Brooke A. Ackerly
