Gender and power in the research process

This article explores the gender dynamics in a multidisciplinary research team, focussing particularly on the way gendered power struggles affect the production of knowledge. Gender-based conflicts over the relevance of gender to the research process threatened to silence all the women involved in the research: the researchers, the participants and the woman on the management team. As the research was exploring the under-representation of women in senior positions in organisations and their experiences of gendered processes at work, this silencing would have had particularly serious implications for the outcome of the project. During this conflict, power resources were mobilised by both women and men. The eventual resolution of the conflict ensured that women's voices were heard and their experiences made visible. This had a crucial effect on both the research process and the outcome of the research project and demonstrates the critical effect of gender on the knowledge that can be produced by research.     

Gender and power in a post-nationalist European Union

The issue of gender and ICT and the concern about an emerging digital divide in Norway have been dominated by a fear that the symbolic content and practices around ICT—epitomized in the hacker stereotype—are turning women off by making them feel like entering a “boy's room” when using ICT. State feminist policies have been developed to cope with these challenges, directed at schools and universities in particular. This paper provides a critical discussion of the state feminist understanding of gender and ICT, to argue the need for a more heterogeneous approach.     

Orwell's despair,Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia

George Orwell's 1984 bears a striking resemblance to a little-known anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night, that was published twelve years earlier. While the similarities between the two books are in some cases remarkable, of even greater interest is the different treatment of political domination and gender ideology in the two novels. Orwell's critique of power worship is inherently limited by his inability to perceive that preoccupations with power and domination are specifically associated with the male gender role. By contrast, Katherine Burdekin, a feminist writer who published Swastika Night using the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’, focuses her critique on the ‘cult of masculinity’ and the fascist dictatorship to which it can lead. Her novel is set 700 years in the future, after Hitlerism has been established in Europe as the official creed, and with it a ‘Reduction of Women’ to an animal level. This essay analyses the relationship between gender and power as understood by these two writers, one world-famous, the other forgotten.     

Promotion of Gender Equality at the Workplace: Gender Mainstreaming and Collective Bargaining in Italy

The article examines gender equality in collective bargaining and looks at the extent to which gender and equal opportunities issues have been mainstreamed in industrial relations systems in Italy where, despite the existence of old and new legislation on gender equality, there are persistently low levels of female employment and the precarious workforce is made up predominantly of women. The central question addressed in the article is whether the injection of a gender mainstreaming approach in the Italian collective bargaining system, combined with legislative measures, may improve the situation of women in the context of both public and private spheres. In particular, the article looks at whether gender mainstreaming has the potential to pave the way towards an ethos of substantive equality at the workplace, whereby women enter the workforce on equal terms and men are in a position to share the dual responsibilities of paid and unpaid work. The article maintains that gender mainstreaming may fulfil its transformative potential as a catalyst for changing both the conceptual and analytical tools which the law deploys, provided it is envisaged as a three-fold strategy involving simultaneous processes of deconstruction, replacement and inclusive measures, together with deliberative forms of democracy and the imposition of a statutory positive duty on public authorities to mainstream equality.

Evolution and Gender

Dupre´ considers recent attempts to explain gendered difference in human behaviour by an appeal to evolutionary theory, particularly in the context of the recent programme of 'evolutionary psychology'. It argues that the fundamental assumptions of this programme are unsupported and implausible, and the attempt it offers of providing a universal account of human behaviour does little or nothing to counter the prima facie diversity of gender difference. A more sophisticated understanding of evolutionary theory suggests that we should see gender as developing out of a complex and variable cascade of interactions between biology and environment, rather than as the expression of species-wide biological universals.     

Gender,identity and experience: Researching marginalised groups

This article will examine the status of the researcher when conducting research with Gypsy families and Asian women. It will explore how the positioning of the researcher as an outsider and insider can affect the research relationship and can be a useful and privileged position from which to engage in the research process. Gender, identity and experience can create a shared empathy and a shared understanding between the respondent and the researcher in which trust and rapport can encourage respondents to open up and discuss their personal experiences. The article also examines the complexities and tensions associated with how the status and identity of the interviewer can affect the research relationship and how an appreciation of difference is fundamental to this process.     

Special Issue: Gender,Sexuality and Human Rights

This brief article introduces a special issue of Feminist Legal Studies addressing gender, sexuality and human rights, and comprising papers drawn from an E.S.R.C.-funded workshop held at the University of Kent in June 2004 on the theme of “Gender-Auditing the Human Rights Act”. The article begins by situating the themes of the special issue within the broader context of feminist engagement with rights discourse. It goes on to consider the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 into the U.K. with a view to assessing its implications in terms of engendering a positive legal and political culture for equality-seeking initiatives. The article concludes with a survey of the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the possibilities for feminist theory and strategy posed by a wider intersectional engagement with rights issues.