State Feminism, Women's Movements, and Job Training

Making Democracies Work in the Global Economy

Amy Mazur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138996472
• eBook ISBN: 9781136533518
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing from the work of internationally renowned scholars from the Research Network on Gender, Politics and the State (RNGS), this study offers in-depth analysis of the relationship between state feminism, women's movements and public policy and places them within a comparative theoretical framework. Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and the U.S. are all discussed individually.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Amy G. Mazur

HOW DO CITIZENS MAKE STABLE DEMOCRACIES MORE REPRESENTATIVE and democratic in the context of pressure to compete in the emerging global economy? Have contemporary states in postindustrial societies incorporated the demands of social movements in their institutions and policies in a way that concretely improves the representation of the excluded and disenfranchised groups for which movements speak? If meaningful representation of out-groups in the affairs of government has occurred, what are the conditions under which such “state transformation” (Quadagno 1992) takes place? This book aims to contribute to answering these complex and interrelated questions through a systematic cross-national study of the relations between women's movements and women's policy offices in postindustrial democracies in the development of job training policy.¹

Established for the most part as a response to the new women's movements of the 1970s in western countries, women's policy “machineries” (UN 1993) have been a constant presence in governments throughout the world.² These state-based structures have been assigned a variety of forms at all different levels of government, ranging from temporary advisory commissions to permanent ministries with administrative divisions. In France, for example, there were 21 different types of women's policy agencies in national, regional, departmental and local governments in 2000 (Mazur et al. 2000). Although the specific missions, institutional capacities, and ideological parameters of women's policy offices are by no means uniform, they all share a formal charge of improving some aspect of women's status, rights, and/or social conditions, despite the difficulty of identifying one single set of women's interests (Molyneux 1985).³ As such, these machineries are often directly involved with the development of women's policies that are either separately formulated or inserted into mainstream public policy.

As a growing body of research shows, women's policy offices are not always friends of the groups, individuals, and “publics” ⁴ identified in this study under the general rubric, women's movements. Indeed, in some countries, they have undermined the ability of women's groups to advance their agendas and have pursued policy lines that are perceived by many activists to be quite counterproductive to advancing the cause of women. Nonetheless, the way women's policy machineries were first created and have since operated within the purview of, if not in collaboration with, women's movements provides a particularly useful laboratory for understanding whether democratic states can be transformed by social movements. As students of women's policy offices agree, whether these new government agencies are actually effective is a question for research—a question that is at the center of this book.

Addressing the issue of women's policy agency effectiveness raises much larger and quite thorny concerns about whether contemporary states can be feminist. At issue is whether governments actually have improved women's rights, status, and/or conditions, as they are defined in their cultural contexts, and reduced gender based hierarchies that are the root causes of inequalities between, men and women in the public and private spheres.⁵ For many feminists, the male-dominated and patriarchal nature of the state makes it impossible for any government to be women-friendly, much less promote a proactive feminist agenda.⁶ In contrast, students of “state feminism” and women's policy machineries “dissaggregate” the state and see it as a potential, but by no means certain, arena for social change for women's movements, organizations, and individuals.⁷

In addition to the formal bureaucratic structures that states create in the name of women's issues and/or feminism, the agents who work in these structures are key players. Although there is some disagreement over the use of the concept, researchers of state feminism call administrative agents who work in women's policy offices and who overtly promote a feminist agenda, essentially feminist bureaucrats, femocrats (e.g., Outshoorn 1992; Sawer 1990; Eisenstein 1990). Femocrats can come from a diverse set of backgrounds. They can be former women's movement advocates, former politicians, or career bureaucrats. Even men have been identified as femocrats, although not in great number. What unites femocrats is their administrative position in government and a commitment to advancing a feminist agenda. Thus, although women's policy agencies are the potential structural conduit for women's movements, femocrats are a possible human link between movement and state.

This book explores the women's policy office-women's movement encounter in policymaking arenas in a selection of Western postindustrial democracies: Austria, Spain, Italy, France, Finland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States and at the supranational European Union (EU) level. The analysis is conducted with the framework developed by the Research Network on Gender, Politics, and the State (RNGS)—a 45-member research group founded in 1995. By using in-depth analysis of a large number of cases, the researchers seek to determine whether women's policy agencies bring women's movement issues and actors into policymaking processes of the state. With this information, the second goal is to sort through different explanations for why some governments and their women's policy machineries are more responsive to women's movement policy demands than others.

The members of RNGS developed the analytical framework for this study to maximize the likelihood it will contribute to comparative theory on social movements, democratic representation, and institutions. Rather than trying to compare policy outcomes or impact, which are difficult to measure in diverse cultural contexts, the framework focuses on the “substantive” and “descriptive” representation of interests in the policy process (Pitkin 1967). This approach places the expression of ideas that favor women's interests in their full complexity—substantive representation—and the actual presence of women in policy formation—descriptive representation—at the center of the analysis. More specifically, this study scrutinizes whether women's policy offices contribute to bringing ideas that emanate from women's movements and the women who advance those ideas into the central business of government. Although Beckwith and others draw attention to the difference between “women's movements, ” “women in social movements, ” and “feminist movements” (Beckwith 2000:431), this study considers a broad spectrum of actors and institutions that can potentially represent women's interests, whether they are overtly feminist or not, under the rubric women's movements. These include autonomous women's movements that organize outside of mainstream political institutions as well as women's mobilization within established organizations such as political parties and trade unions. Women's advocates can be individuals, e.g., politicians, policy experts, academics, or bureaucrats, who publicly promote a women's agenda as well. Women's publics are also considered as potential purveyors of women-friendly ideas and actors.

Reflecting comparative policy research that eschews identifying a single national “policy style” (e.g., Feick 1992; Harrop 1992; Ashford 1992; Hayward 1992, Garçia-Ramon and Monk 1996), the RNGS framework assumes the potential for different policy patterns across policy sectors within a single country.⁸ The major analytical unit, therefore, is the policy debate; that is, public discussions about government action as they unfold in national contexts. This book examines 25 different policy debates on job training. As such, it presents an application of the RNGS research design to examine women's policy agencies, women's movements and democratic states in the first of five issues areas to be examined by the larger RNGS project. Books describing the others will follow: abortion, political representation, prostitution/trafficking women, and an issue of general national significance. At the same time, this book reports on the findings of a standalone comparative research project that contributes independently to understanding the record and capacity of postindustrial democracies in expanding access to policymaking processes.

As a policy area, job training is particularly interesting, given the way in which training policy issues, and the larger employment policies to which they are often coupled, tend to be designed against a backdrop of the imperatives of global economic forces.⁹ Since the late 1970s, the politics of job training policy in postindustrial democracies, with their substantial tertiary sectors and high tech economies, showcases the tensions produced by cuts in state/welfare spending to maximize national economic competition in the emerging global economy (Ducatel 1994; Esping-Anderson 1999, 1993; Stetson 1998; Rees 1992). These tensions may include the desire to develop a work force that can compete with cheaper labor sources in less well-off countries despite extensive labor costs; the desire to upgrade the skills of the work force to meet the demands of new high technology industries despite traditions of job security and seniority; the desire to privatize or downsize government programs despite popular support for generous welfare policies; and the desire to promote private sector investment across national boundaries despite long-standing protectionist practices.

Women are arguably at the center of these national responses to global economic pressures and the conflicts they produce. On one hand women workers, more than men, tend to be used as the major source of inexpensive and flexible labor. On the other, the trend to downsize welfare states affects women because they have been primary clients of welfare state policies, as a major source of public employment and family caretakers. (Drew et al. 1998; Rees 1999, 1992; Stetson 1998). Although women appear to be on the front line of receiving the brunt of dislocations of economic restructuring, the mainstream players involved with making economic policy—organized labor, business, and employment administration decision makers—do not automatically recognize the gendered impact of their actions, let alone take women's interests into consideration, either in terms of their specific role in economic changes or of the disparate impact of those changes on women in comparison to men (Rees 1992, 1998; Jenson et al. 1988; Drew et al. 1998). It may rest with women's movements and women's policy machineries to compel mainstream employment policy actors to take into consideration the negative impacts of the imperatives of the emerging global economy on women. It is not just a matter of specific policies introduced in a piecemeal fashion, but bringing women's interests into the policy community. In other words, women and their representatives have the potential for changing state policy through entering the policymaking arena and participating in the way training policy is framed and defined.

The remainder of the chapter presents the analytical and empirical background for the country-based studies as well as the comparative framework that structures most of the chapters. Keeping in mind the proviso of comparativists, like Sartori (1970) and Collier and Mahon (1993), that an essential part of good comparative political analysis is to develop concepts that can “travel” across national boundaries without being “stretched” beyond their essence, the chapter provides operational definitions for the key analytical concepts of this study.

JOB TRAINING: AN IMPORTANT POLICY ISSUE FOR COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

A key assumption of this study is that for women's interests to be substantively represented, policy discussions need to take into account the unequal way in which men's and women's roles are defined and how that gets translated into the concrete reality of men's and women's life choices, social rights, and economic status; in other words policy debates need to be gendered.¹⁰ Whether a given policy debate is gendered does not imply only that policy actors discuss or mention men's and women's roles. The general frame and flow of the entire debate must recognize the way in which social problems are determined by established gender roles. Likewise, solutions must be crafted to address socially constructed biases against men and women that create sex-based inequalities in reality. The notion of gendering policy debate frames is different from a gender issue. A gender issue is one that necessarily has a disparate impact on men and women, which tends to be bad for women. Gendering a policy debate, in the long term, is usually beneficial for women (Stetson 1998).

This section further explores the issues of gendering debates and gender issues in the policy field of job training. It first describes why RNGS selected job training policy as one of the five areas to study questions of gendering and women's movement/women's policy office impact. Next, it turns to a more specific discussion of gendering and gender issues in job training. The section concludes by raising the problem of studying training polices in light of the absence of international definitions of this policy area and the dearth of comparative research. The discussion shows how this book deals with the analytical ambiguities of training policy.

RNGS Choice of Job Training

An important assumption of the Research Network on Gender, Politics and the State is that the activities of women's policy offices and women's movements should be observed in a cross section of policy areas that deal with the different dimensions of gender that organize relations between men and women. RNGS identified four different gender dimensions—the division of labor between home and paid work, reproduction, sexuality, and citizenship rights. The group selected a policy area from each general category of gendered problems that could be studied in all countries in the project and that could be framed in either gender-specific or gender neutral terms.

Job training was selected by the RNGS group because it was clearly an important area of government action in all of the countries in the study, although as this study shows the specific dimensions of training policy vary from country to country, and because training policy issues have been fram...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1. Introduction
• PART I. The European Context
• PART II. The Debates
• APPENDIX 1. RNGS Worksheets and Independent Variable Indicators
• APPENDIX 2. Country Guide to the Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Bibliography
• Index