A world apart. Swedish and Australian gender equality policy

This article focuses on the process of gender-equality policy in Sweden and Australia, from 1960 to 1990. It is suggested that the comparative gender analysis must be more susceptible for civil rights issues. A second argument is that the in-depth achievements of the Swedish gender equality policy and the relative weaknesses in other respects are better understood if Swedish gender policy is analysed from an institutional perspective. Finally, the analysis provides an institutional explanation of why it is problematic to establish and maintain policies that do not build on the dominant political tradition of the welfare state in question.     

Social Investment in Gender Equality? Changing Perspectives on Work and Welfare in Norway

In many EU countries, the so-called social investment perspective has provided new arguments for active welfare state policies. The social investment perspective is characterized by emphasizing the role of the state to increase participation in employment by investing in the working capacity of the population—particularly women—through activation programmes and social policies. In this article we depart from recent debates surrounding this perspective to explore changes in Norwegian work and welfare policies, and the role of gender equality in these changes. In Norway, both female employment and fertility levels are high, but women still have a looser connection to the labour market compared to men, for example due to the large proportion in part-time positions, which makes changes in work and welfare policies an interesting case for exploring the relevance of the social investment perspective in this context. The empirical analysis suggests that ideas of social investment indeed have permeated recent changes in Norwegian work and welfare policies. However, questions of gender equality are not addressed in the documents introducing these changes, except when the problem at hand is the employment rate of migrant women—who are the main recipients of activation policies. In conclusion, we claim that social investment is a relevant lens for analysing changes in Norwegian work and welfare policies, but that a dual-tracked vision of gender equality is emerging, making migrant women the significant target of social investment.     

Girl culture as a chastity belt

The concept of the women-friendly welfare states, introduced by the Norwegian political scientist Helga Maria Hernes in 1987, has had a considerable influence on welfare theory and research. In this article the normative basis and the analytical potential of the concept are explored. The concept can be criticized for its bias towards social democratic welfare states, which has challenged its analytical potential. Instead of abandoning it altogether, the authors suggest that an alternative could be to reformulate and contextualize the concept with gender equality as the key notion. The reformulation would make it possible to distinguish analytically between women-friendliness and policies that promote gender equality between different dimensions of welfare, and between civil and political from social aspects of citizenship.     

Editorial

Welfare state support for the reconciliation of work and family has long been regarded as a characteristic of the Scandinavian welfare state and a trademark of its "woman-friendly" policies. Based on an examination of important Nordic childcare policy reforms of the 1990s, such as the expansion of state-sponsored childcare services, the strengthening of fathers' rights to care and the institution of cash grants for childcare, the impact of reforms on mothers and fathers as workers and carers is discussed. In conclusion, the discussion returns to the reconciliation of work and family, and asks: To what extent have reproduction policies succeeded in updating the traditional gender contract of the male breadwinner family?     

Women’s equality in Northern Ireland’s transition: intersectionality in theory and place

Women are invisible in mainstream analyses of the Northern Irish conflict. The prodigious literature is uninformed by gender analysis. These absences have discursive and material implications for tackling women’s inequality in a society in transition from armed conflict. Feminist intersectional theory counters and complicates essentialist constructions of identity. It aids understanding of the Northern Irish context by bringing into view issues of gender, sect and class. The tentative intersectional theoretical framework developed in this article is tested in an empirical study of women’s poverty. This supports the argument that intersectional analysis is required if the policy approach to women’s equality in Northern Ireland is to benefit the most marginalised women and thereby improve the prospects of building a more stable and peaceable society.     

“This is a Book about Choices”: Gender,Genre and (Auto)Biographical Prison Narratives

The article discusses equal rights to equal participation and public policies for gender balance in different societal arenas. Although gender balance is a central aim of official Norwegian gender equality politics, male hegemony is the dominant feature in most institutional settings of leadership, power and influence. This inconsistency is rhetorically handled through travel metaphors of gender equality and utility arguments about women's contributions to public life. Gender equality then becomes a question of time, and of how society would profit from “more” gender equality. The rights perspective is distorted. In the final part of the article, we discuss alternative, normative, approaches: gender balance in relation to parity in participation, a distributive norm of simple equality, and principles of non‐discrimination.     

DON'T SHUT UP: AUSTRALIA'S FIRST PAID PARENTAL LEAVE SCHEME AND BEYOND

Through the perspective of women's conflicting roles, this paper examines the capacity of the Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme to assist Australian families negotiate paid work and parenthood. Drawing on comparisons with other nation-state policies and interview data with Western Australian women, this paper argues that women's choices remain limited despite the introduction of the Paid Parental Leave scheme. I suggest that while Paid Parental Leave is an important reform for gender equality and improving work/life balance for many Australian families, it is not sufficient. The policy and culture of Australian workplaces need improvement.     

LOVING TO STRAIGHTEN OUT DEVELOPMENT: SEXUALITY AND ETHNODEVELOPMENT IN THE WORLD BANK'S ECUADORIAN LENDING

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation.     

“It Is So Swedish That You Have to Work”. Returning Swedish Migrant Women’s Negotiations of Gender Equality and Heterosexuality

Notions of gender equality are strongly linked to the Swedish self-image. This article explores returning Swedish migrant women’s negotiations of heterosexual gender equality ideals based on their experiences of being housewives to middle- and upper-class men with work contracts abroad. From fieldwork conducted within two networks for returning Swedes, the article provides an analysis of the ways in which the women talk about work, gender equality, and domestic workers.

The analysis of the women’s accounts of gender relations shows that different ways of doing femininity are central in their narratives. By using the concepts “emphasized femininity” and “gender-equal femininity” the article highlights the different forms of femininity that can be traced in the women’s narratives. Drawing from the empirical examples, it is shown that the women are troubled by Swedish gender equality ideals and express a feeling of not “fitting in” after returning to Sweden. I suggest that the women’s articulations of not “fitting in” to (imagined) gender-equal Sweden tend to downplay the fact that they still have advantages that assist with “fitting in” from social positions such as class, whiteness, and (hetero)sexuality: positions which may create space for negotiating social norms in Sweden.     

‘I’m about to get my tamp on.’ Framing tampons in We Media promotion posts targeting Chinese females

With much silence around menstruation, certain superstitions and beliefs still prevail in Confucian East Asian cultures such as China. As a result, domestic tampon brands did not appear until 2016. This study examines the promotion posts of tampons that are new to Chinese females on We Media channels. Specifically, a content analysis was conducted on the frames used in these promotion posts composed by different types of public accounts, guided by the intersectional perspective. Besides the commonly used generic frames, the issue-specific frames reflected how public accounts symbolized the use of the product. More than half of the promotion posts focused on the health benefits of tampons, and about a quarter portrayed them as being trendy. Despite their relative small amounts, the care and independence frames were also worth further attention, considering that contemporary Chinese society is increasingly normalizing gender equality and females’ economic independence. While a spectrum of values and ideas co-exist, these posts reflect the gender equality wave of the current kaleidoscopic Chinese society.     

The forgotten ‘mateys’: women workers in Portsmouth Dockyard,England, 1939-45

Abstract

This paper is based on nearly 30 interviews with women who worked in Portsmouth Dockyard before and during the Second World War. Their testimonies show that women experienced their wartime work in different ways, with attitudes that were to impinge on employment relations, on calls for equal pay and on the provision of facilities to relieve their domestic responsibilities. Government response to these problems reveal the duality of policy decisions and the difficulties of balancing the need for labour with dominant ideals about the cultural position of women. Shifts in employment practices in wartime conditions highlight the debates around the impact of wartime work on gender divisions in the workplace and perceptions of female paid employment by both men and women at that time.     

Considering the role of men in gender agenda setting: conceptual and policy issues

The international gender equality agenda evolved into one of mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes. Within this process, the role of men gained increasing attention in the debates on gender equality. This resulted in the inclusion of ‘men's role’ as one of the themes of the agenda of the Commission on the Status of Women for the year 2004. While this is another step forward in the global efforts for achieving equality between women and men, its potential risks should not be overlooked. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit the concept of gender and carefully assess and monitor how the role of men is included in the agenda. This article starts with the premise that gender inequalities are the product of historically determined gender order in which the differentially assigned male female attributes are unequally structured in layers of privileged and subordinate positions of masculinities and femininities. The concept of patriarchy is brought back into the analysis to capture the interlinkages between the various status hierarchies that lead to shifts in hegemonic forms of masculinity that reproduces itself under diverse and changing conditions. Thus, while the article attempts to account for the generic and universal characteristics of gender inequality, at the same time, it draws attention to its specific socio-cultural manifestations. Finally, policy guidelines are offered for the consideration of the role of men in gender agenda setting. Accordingly, it is suggested that men's initiatives for alternative masculinities are acknowledged and that the questions regarding which men, in what kinds of alliances and for which end are reflected upon in formulating policies.     

Åkesson at Almedalen: Intersectional Tensions and Normalization of Populist Radical Right Discourse in Sweden

This study analyses the populist radical right discourse of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD), examining how Jimmie Åkesson, the SD chairperson, conceptualized gendered social positions in the folkhem ([Swedish] people’s home) in his annual speeches in Almedalen, since the SD entered the Swedish Parliament in 2010 to date. Attention is being paid to whose voices are allowed to come forth and in which manner this is done, and to how inequalities intersecting gender and ethnicity are explained and reproduced, as means to normalize populist radical right discourse in Sweden. Theoretically, the study rests on the conceptualization of the populist radical right as a thin-centred ideology, which is contingently adapted to national politics, to which it ads “intersectionality from above” as a specific analytical perspective. The discourse-historical approach (DHA) provides the methodological tools for the analysis and facilitates its contextual positioning. The article contributes analytically to the field, shedding light on how, in the context of populist radical right discourse, welfare chauvinist appeals are employed formally to acknowledge the importance of gender equality in Sweden, and are used as a device to contour two antithetic entities: the supposedly gender-equal Swedish ethnic majority as the opposite of the allegedly deeply patriarchal migrant Other. The article also contributes empirically to the study of the populist radical right in Sweden. It provides a more nuanced picture of the party’s ideological transformations in what is envisaged to be their ideological normalization—from fringe nationalism (antidemocratic national socialism) and outright racism to welfare chauvinism and cultural racism (Islamophobic exclusionary nationalism) in conservative clothing.     

The Corporatist Regime,Welfare State Employment,and Gender Pay Inequity

Mainstream economics conceptualizes wages as determined by market forces and reflecting productivity and investments in human capital made by individuals. These views, which have become taken-for-granted explanations of what wages are, hide the underlying dynamics of the gender pay gap and place responsibility on individuals instead of gendered social structures. This article proposes viewing gender pay inequity through a sociological lens, which implies acknowledging the complex societal dynamics and roles of institutions and actors in shaping wages. The Nordic welfare states are often considered women-friendly, providing female citizens with social policies and services that have enabled their extensive participation in paid employment. Simultaneously, the Finnish welfare state has relied heavily on inexpensive labour provided by women, thus actively contributing to the formation of a secondary female-dominated labour market. The secondary status of reproductive work conducted within the public sector has been further strengthened and institutionalized by the Finnish corporatist system via collective agreements. In policy-making, the central actors defend their vested interests through non-decision-making, limiting the scope of decision-making to non-threatening issues. This article discusses the dynamics of the Finnish corporatist regime, welfare-state employment, and the impact of both on gender pay equity in Finnish society.     

Framing Leave for Fathers in Norway and Poland: Just a Matter of Gender Equality?

How has leave for fathers been framed during periods of intensive public debates in Norway and Poland? Recognizing that childcare policy is one of the key aspects of social citizenship, the article examines justifications for adopting paternity and parental leave schemes by mapping master and minor frames in various policy documents and newspaper articles. In Norway, periods of leave earmarked for fathers have been in operation for more than 20 years and comprise 10 weeks with full wage compensation in 2016. In Poland a two-week period of paid leave for fathers with full compensation was introduced in 2010. In both countries, fathers are also entitled to share parental leave with mothers. Our argument is that despite the different political, financial, and social context in the two countries, the discussions in Norway and Poland reveal certain similarities with regard to framing fathers’ leave as a degenderizing policy tool. In both countries, leave periods for fathers have been promoted as a means for changing masculinity and fatherhood, as well as a measure for advancing gender equality in the labour market. However, the analysis also shows that there are differences. While in Norway fathers’ schemes are increasingly seen as a tool to close the gendered pay gap, their potential for responding to demographic challenges has been central in Polish debates.     

Help for housewives: domestic service and the reconstruction of domesticity in Britain, 1940-50

This article argues that examining the debates over domestic science that took place in the late 1940s can produce insights into the ways in which gender, class and domesticity were inextricably linked and understood. The article focuses on three specific examples: a social survey of domestic service produced privately, a government report on the domestic organization of private households, and a radio debate broadcast by the BBC Home Service     

At your service madam! the globalization of domestic service

This article deals with the question of new domestic servants. It sets out to describe a ‘new’ phenomenon manifesting itself all over Europe, that is the comeback of domestic workers and carers for children and the elderly in many households. It then proceeds to explain the establishment of an informal labour market in the private sector, which arises amid today's revolution of information technology.Research sources on the current situation are scarce compared to historical studies. This is particularly true for Germany and even more for the Netherlands. The present situation differs from its earlier appearance mainly in that domestic workers today are migrant women from Eastern Europe, from Asia or South America.The article aims to show how studying this phenomenon raises relevant questions both on an empirical and a theoretical level for gender studies as well as for migration studies. It pleads in favour of an intersectional analysis by taking into account class, gender and ethnic differences within the context of globalized labour markets and transnational migration movements.     

‘Doing gender and gender equality’ through emotional expressions during a research interview. Views of highly educated Swedish young adults

The aim of this article is to contribute to the knowledge on how concepts of gender and gender equality are constructed within research interviews, deepening our understanding of the underlying gender system in society. We focus on emotions and emotional processes expressed during interviews on work and family when specific questions originating in the World Value Survey were asked. Our study is based on interviews with highly educated women and men, in two metropolitan areas of Sweden. In this article, we seek to shed more light on how incorporating emotional expressions and the evaluation of these emotions can grasp the construction of gender and gender equality. We highlight the range of emotional expressions that appear during the interviews, differences in their usage by women and men and the links to the construction of gender and gender equality. We explore how the specific situation of the interview influences ‘doing gender and gender equality’ through emotions. Our results reveal that men and women use similar but also different emotional expressions in conforming to the gender equality norm. Men and women, interviewers and interviewees agreed on this norm, but the ways they ’performed’ the norm are gender based.     

gendered representations in Hawai‘i’s anti-GMO activism

The aim of this article is to analyse some of the representations of intersectional gender that materialise in activism against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It uses the case of Hawai‘i as a key node in global transgenic seed production and hotspot for food, land and farming controversies. Based on ethnographic work conducted since 2012, the article suggests some of the ways that gender is represented within movements against GMOs by analysing activist media representations. The article shows how gender, understood intersectionally, informs possibilities for movement-identification, exploring how themes of motherhood, warrior masculinities and sexualised femininities are represented within these movements. The article suggests that some activist representations of gender invoke what could be considered as normative framings of gender similar to those seen in other environmental, food and anti-GMO movements. It is suggested that these gendered representations may influence and limit how different subjects engage with Hawai'i anti-GMO movements. At the same time, contextual, intersectional readings demonstrate the complex histories behind what appear to be gender normative activist representations. Taken together, this emphasis on relative norms of femininities and masculinities may provide anti-GMO organising with familiar social frames that counterbalance otherwise threatening campaigns against (agri)business in the settler state. Understood within these histories, the work that gender does within anti-GMO organising may offer generative examples for thinking through the relationships between gendered representations and situated, indigenous-centred, food and land-based resistances.     

Putting Gender and Ethnic Discrimination on the Political Agenda: The Creation of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman and the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination in Sweden

During the last few decades, Swedish welfare policy has been increasingly criticized by various social groups who take as their point of departure the limitations of a social policy that predominantly focuses on class equality and paid work. The establishment of special public authorities, commissioned to combat discrimination against particular groups of citizens, may be interpreted as a manifestation of increased state attention to social disadvantages rooted in culture rather than the economy. This article takes a closer look at the processes by which social justice claims have been transformed into matters of public responsibility by exploring the creation of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman (JämO) and the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination (DO). Drawing on policy documents and interviews with key persons, we investigate how “the women's question” and “the ethnic minority question” have been articulated in Swedish politics. The aim is to describe the processes by which gender and ethnicity were politicized, a politicization eventually resulting in state initiatives to establish the two ombudsman offices. Particular attention is given to the role played by the social sciences in these processes, e.g. the ways in which scientific knowledge was employed in political discourse.