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Part 1
Gender change and EU gender mainstreaming
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1
Introduction
âThere is no gender issue,â said my interview subject, somewhat flustered. Thus began a not atypical interview during the first round of fieldwork for my book about EU gender mainstreaming (GM) and how it works. It's probably clear from the title of this book Making Gender Equality Happen that I'm unlikely to agree with this interviewee's point of view. I can however empathise with it fairly easily. Even very young children can identify and rebel against overtly sexist social rules, like the ones which mark out girls playing rugby or boys doing ballet as odd or unusual. However, the GM policy aims to tackle something a little more complicated.
We pressed on with the interview as I asked about low numbers of women working in her department. She argued that gender inequality was not a problem generally and definitely not a problem âhereâ, once even banging her fist on the table. She described many situations and phenomena, which I would identify as examples of gender inequality but she argued that these were natural and that nothing could be done about natural phenomena.
Well-read policy makers and feminists reading this book will know that the GM policy is based on a different perspective. Namely, the idea that gender inequality is still a problem and more specifically that assumptions about what men and women1 should be and should do, are everywhere all the time. GM is premised on the view that these assumptions play a key role in the organisation of social and political life and that they mediate access to power, recognition of merit, status and authority. Social scientists refer to this cluster of norms and assumptions using the word âgenderâ and have shown how gender varies across cultures and over time, and that we constantly enact and re-negotiate gender in daily life, often without consciously realising it (Beckwith 2005; Butler 1990; Connell 1987; Scott 1986; West & Zimmerman 1987). When social scientists say gender inequality is âstructuralâ and that gender is âsocially constructedâ, we are referring to these patterns, processes and practices.
Feminist political scientists have applied these theoretical insights to the political realm, exploring how the state (and supra-national organisations like the EU), maintain these kinds of gender hierarchies and inequalities. These studies have identified not only how policies can push citizens into particular gender roles, or fail to serve women's interests (Hawkesworth 1994; Kantola 2006) but also how practices and assumptions construct gender within organisations (Acker 1992, p.568; Halford & Leonard 2001).
In the simplest terms, the GM policy is a demand aimed at policy makers to do two things: firstly, to act upon these feminist understandings of gender as a socially constructed, ever present structural phenomenon; and secondly to analyse and revise policy accordingly. This second step might involve identifying gendered assumptions embedded in policy that push men and women into different roles, or tendencies to ignore one sex's interests, and then making appropriate changes. If this happened, the state would stop producing and maintaining gender inequality. Instead the state's capacity could be harnessed to serve women's and men's needs in equal measure, helping to make gender equality happen.
In wider political life, however, feminist activists seeking to highlight and politicise gender inequality have often found themselves confronting entrenched assumptions, that the phenomena they wish to discuss are âjust naturalâ or are not problematic. For this reason, feminist activism is often marked by a specific kind of contestation â ongoing efforts to identify and name inequalities and to argue that they merit political attention. In this way, feminist activism has consistently pushed against the boundaries of what is conventionally perceived of as politically relevant (Beckwith 2005; Bacchi & Eveline 2010; Connell 1990; Fraser 1989; Weldon 2002). Ongoing contestations over what is, or is not, recognised as a legitimate issue for political attention, occupy a central role in feminist activism and research.
I had these ideas in the back of my mind as I listened to my interviewee but I was acutely aware that I'd actually only come to understand them myself during my post-graduate studies. At âgrad-schoolâ, I was supported by multiple conversations with feminists who patiently listened, as I unravelled years of unconscious assumptions and, to be honest, my own outright misogyny. In fact, realising that gender is everywhere was quite a painful and confusing experience for me. Most people who embrace these kinds of ideas do so in spaces like graduate schools or activist circles, where time is actively dedicated to the development of autonomous thinking.
Given how long it took me to understand feminist perspectives and how painful I found accepting them, how could I reasonably assume that a bureaucrat should âgetâ gender mainstreaming, unless they had taken a gender studies course or were confronted by startling and obvious instances of sexism, which affected them personally? The majority of people within Europe don't call themselves feminists, haven't studied gender and are not pre-occupied with its relentless influence on the politics of our daily lives. So although I wasn't enthused by my interview subject's off-hand response, her perspective struck me as normal, understandable and most importantly, highly emblematic of the kinds of dynamics frequently confronting both gender equality activists and civil servants working with the GM policy.
I think we should bear this in mind. GM's rise to prominence as a well-accepted policy tool has occurred within a confusing socio-political context where increased acceptance of gender equality as a legitimate though vaguely defined goal, co-exists with common disinterest in, or hostility to, âfeminismâ. Feminist activists have successfully managed to promote GM as the best practice gender equality policy all over the world, seeing it adopted in over 100 states and multiple supra-national organisations (True & Mintrom 2001, p.27). Nonetheless, GM has failed to deliver the results feminist activists hoped for (Daly 2005; Mazey 2000). Research has shown many instances where implementers seem to reject the policy, arguing that gender inequality is a non-problem (Connell 2006) or that they don't know how to implement it (Lombardo & Mergaert 2013; Mergaert & Lombardo 2014). To put it another way gender equality policies are often implemented in contexts where âtheory is thinâ (Benschop & Verloo 2011, p.278).
Taking these realities as its most basic starting point, Making Gender Equality Happen asks how a policy based on abstract ideas like âthe social construction of genderâ, which was consciously developed in feminist spaces outside the mainstream over many years, can travel back into it. How is GM and the equality which the policy is designed to pursue, understood and acted upon (or not), when it re-enters the mainstream political world? Under what circumstances might we expect to see a blossoming comprehension that gender is socially constructed and relevant in all policies? How would policy makers' newly devised, gender-mainstreamed policies look? What processes of change would be involved? Under what circumstances can we expect a continuance of pre-existing practices? In short, how does GM make equality happen?
Re-thinking gender mainstreaming
This understanding of GM, which explicitly formulates it as a set of ideas travelling from autonomous to mainstream spaces, differs from that found in most existing research examining it. Indeed, this book starts from the position that the existing body of research on GM has focused on the gap between the intended and the actual outcomes of GM, without exploring the dynamics underpinning these outcomes sufficiently. Much existing research has illustrated that GM implementation is often patchy, and that the structural conception of gender inequality and the intention to change existing practice within the state, both frequently disappear when the policy is implemented (Bretherton 2001; Daly 2005; Mazey 2000). In fact, because of these discrepancies GM is often portrayed as a bit of a disappointment (Weiner & MacRae 2014).
I argue that these results are a very important starting point, but that the approaches they are based upon have three important limitations which prevent us from fully understanding what is under way when GM is implemented. Firstly, they don't operationalise our existing, complex, theoretical understandings of gender as a process, by which I mean a fluid set of meanings that are constantly being re-negotiated. Secondly, such a critical focus on the difference between intended and actual outcomes implicitly assumes that we can reasonably expect a policy to be implemented as it is stated on paper. This is an outcome accepted in the field of policy studies as rather rare (Parsons 1995; Pressman & Wildavsky 1984). Thirdly, much research on GM ignores the way that feminist activism has always had to politicise new issues, chipping away at society's blind spots. If we bear this last point in mind then we can imagine GM implementation as the most recent stage in feminist efforts to reveal, politicise and then ameliorate gender inequalities.
This book also argues, however, that the ways we have tended to analyse GM implementation so far, reflects important gaps in existing feminist political research. Although we have developed increasingly complex theorisations of the social construction of gender and of the state's role in it, these advances have not been matched by adequate operationalisation of these processes in empirical political research. Furthermore, while existing literature provides a nuanced picture of the multiple dynamics involved in the state's reproduction of gender inequality, we cannot yet fully account for the processes through which these dynamics themselves are maintained. As a result, our explanations of why GM has been unsuccessful and most importantly, of how change could really be achieved, are also under-developed.
These lacunae have affected the implementation of GM itself. The theoretical processes through which change would occur when GM is implemented have in many respects been under-theorised, or âfuzzilyâ described in the elaboration of the policy itself (Bendl & Schmidt 2013; Daly 2005; Mazey 2000). This book starts from the argument that we should tackle these limitations in our understanding of how gender equality can be achieved, by examining GM implementation as an attempt to re-negotiate existing gendered assumptions and practices in the context of policy implementation.
Gender knowledge contestation analysis
This book develops a methodological approach, which I have called a gender knowledge contestation analysis (GKC analysis) that enables us to examine GM in this way. This approach uses the analytical concept gender knowledge, which has been used in a small body of research (Andresen and Doelling 2005; Caglar 2010, 2013; Schwenken and Eberhardt 2010; Young & Scherrer 2010) mostly as a tool to highlight differences in the ways people understand and think about gender. If we think back to the way feminist activism has always tried to illuminate blind spots and politicise new issues, it is easy to see why a tool which helps us compare how people understand and think about gender would be of interest.
This book builds on the insights from the small existing literature using the concept of gender knowledge, applying it more explicitly to processes of contestation by fusing it with Interpretative Policy Analysis (IPA) and the Sociology of Knowledge (SK). GKC analysis entails examining policy processes, in this instance related to GM implementation, to look for: 1) changes in how gender and gender inequality is understood and acted upon; 2) the mechanisms underpinning changes in how gender and gender inequality is understood and acted upon; and 3) the mechanisms underpinning stability, where no apparent changes can be detected. The findings in this book show that in âsuccessfulâ instances of GM implementation, we can observe policy makers developing both new insights into the relevance of gender in their work and methods to act upon these insights. In âunsuccessfulâ cases on the other hand we can observe âresistanceâ â attempts to refute the relevance of gender or gender equality to the states' activities and/or to suppress the politicisation and amelioration of gender inequality. The approach developed in this book illustrates that both these outcomes are the product of ongoing policy processes where shared understandings of policy problems are established and then translated into coordinated action.
Analysing gender knowledge entails examining: explicit and implicit representations concerning the differences between the sexes and the relations between them, the origins and normative significance of these, the rationale and evidence underpinning them and their material form. This definition of gender knowledge differs from that used in pre-existing literature using gender knowledge as an analytical framework, in that it emphasises the material processes through which knowledge is embodied, exchanged and promoted, during policy implementation.
It is important to emphasise that gender knowledge is an analytical concept, which has an intellectual heritage in SK and Science and Technology Studies...
