Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society - recent issues

Eastern Houses, Western Bricks? (Re)Constructing Gender Sensibilities in the European Union's Eastward Enlargement

Weiner, E. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:56:19 PDT

In the European Union's (EU) fifth enlargement, the post-socialist states autocratically adopted a set of internationally derived, EU-mandated gender equality legal norms and institutional mechanisms as part of harmonization. Seeking legitimacy, supranational and national, state and civil society actors (particularly feminist nongovernmental organizations) readily conceded to this assumption, with little regard for the compatibility of gender sensibilities, East and West. While gender equality policy may achieve transnational currency, the motives and interests that enable its crossover can also hinder its functionality and imperil the wider political and economic aims that such policy seeks to promote.

Assessing Advocacy: European Transnational Women's Networks and Gender Mainstreaming

Lang, S. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:56:19 PDT

This study investigates how European women's transnational advocacy networks (TANs) practice advocacy in regard to the gender mainstreaming strategy. Women's TANs face gender mainstreaming in several ways: They are considered to be hubs for organizing public dialogue on gender equality strategies in Europe. Moreover, employing mainstreaming tools has become a requirement for acquiring project funds from the European Union. Many TANs and their member groups thus work with mainstreaming. Finally, women's TANs are well positioned to observe and compare the implementation of mainstreaming through interaction with their national and regional members. The article builds on a series of interviews as well as on web-based data analysis to assess positions and advocacy of five European women's TANs in regard to gender mainstreaming. The findings suggest limited trust in and commitment to the strategy, but also limited advocacy. Women's TANs have developed a strategically distant position regarding gender mainstreaming. Lack of internal capacity, overall resource poverty, as well as prioritizing institutional advocacy, this study suggests, might contribute to weak politicization in regard to the gender mainstreaming strategy.

Authenticating Gender Policies through Sustained-Pressure: The Strategy Behind the Success of Turkish Feminists

Marshall, G. A. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:56:19 PDT

The model of "boomerang effect" only partially explains the dynamics of the international and national activism of Turkish feminists. When their demands were not met by the state, feminists reached out to the United Nations and the European Union. However, rather than bypassing the Turkish state as it would be expected by the boomerang model, they kept pressuring the state. This political strategy, which I call sustained-pressure, helped feminists claim responsibility and success during and after the gender policy changes of the 2000s in Turkey. Establishing the indigenousness of the need for change eased ultra-nationalist opposition to external pressure.

Women and Science: What's the Problem?

Garforth, L., Kerr, A. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:56:19 PDT

In recent years the issue of gender and SET (science, engineering, and technology) careers has become prominent in policies and debates in the UK. This paper explores the ways in which equalities solutions pertaining to women and science are locked into a narrow stock of taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the problem. Drawing on Foucauldian models of the productive nature of discourse, we examine the proliferation of reports and initiatives which frame the issue and critically discuss their institutional consequences including gender audits and gender experts, and the ways in which raising the profile of women in science also involves reinscribing feminine difference.

Gender, Class, and Varieties of Capitalism

Mandel, H., Shalev, M. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:03 PDT

The "Varieties of Capitalism" (VoC) perspective is innovative and challenging for the comparative study of gender stratification. However, the project of "gendering the VoC" has some serious shortcomings. While the economic functionalism of VoC theory is in principle gender-neutral, it is in fact implicitly predicated on a man's world. A key proposition of the model, that social protection contributes to the functioning of labor markets is not applicable to women. Moreover, the model's blindness to political forces that are critical to women's employment limits its ability to explain cross-country variations in a major dimension of gender stratification. The VoC perspective is more valuable in explaining differences in women's insertion into the job structure. However, its insights into the effects of skills regimes on women's employment opportunities can be enhanced by attending to the intersection between class and gender. Skill specificity, the critical causal mechanism identified by VoC theorists, has different implications for women in different class positions.

Gender, Inequality, and Capitalism: The "Varieties of Capitalism" and Women

Estevez-Abe, M. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:03 PDT

How Gendering the Varieties of Capitalism Requires a Wider Lens

Rubery, J. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:03 PDT

Varieties of Patriarchal Capitalism

Folbre, N. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:03 PDT

This paper joins Mandel and Shalev in calling for more attention to gender dynamics within the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) literature. However it urges readers to recognize the contribution of social reproduction to production, and to question whether the term "capitalism" accurately captures the most important features of the social formation that we live in.

Is Gender Inequality Greater at Lower or Higher Educational Levels? Common Patterns in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:04 PDT

We compare how gender inequality varies by educational level in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States, representing three different welfare regimes: the conservative, the social democratic, and the liberal. With few exceptions, gender inequality in labor force participation, work hours, occupational segregation, and housework are less severe as education goes up in all three countries, with the root cause being the high employment levels of well-educated women. Despite a common pattern across nations, we note that the educational gradient on gender equality in employment is weaker in Sweden. De-familialization policies in Sweden no doubt increase gender equality at the bottom by pulling less-educated women into the work force. One form of gender equality, wages, however, does not increase with education. In the United States, educational differences in the gender gap in wages are trivial; in Sweden and the Netherlands, the gender wage gap is greatest for the highly educated because of higher returns to education for men than women in these nations.

A Nordic Nirvana? Gender, Citizenship, and Social Justice in the Nordic Welfare States

Lister, R. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:04 PDT

The Nordic model has emerged as some kind of exemplar in much center-left political debate. This overview article starts with a brief account of this political positioning and of the values underpinning the Nordic model. The main focus, however, is the extent to which the Nordic welfare states have been successful in promoting a women-friendly, gender-inclusive model of citizenship, taking account of the differences between the Nordic countries. It offers both a "half-full" and a "half-empty" analysis and ends with the challenge posed to the Nordic model by growing ethnic diversity.

Governance Reforms and Rural Women in India: What Types of Women Citizens are Produced by the Will to Empower?

Everett, J. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:14:04 PDT

In 1993, the Government of India reserved one-third of the seats in rural councils (panchayats) for women, and along with NGOs, set up programs to empower rural women. We examine the usefulness of a Foucauldian governmentality framework in analyzing how women participants in panchayati raj institutions in Pune District, India, have been produced and the ways in which they respond. We conclude that the emphasis of a strong Foucauldian perspective on structure at the expense of agency obscures the complexity of women's responses. In contrast, a weak Foucauldian perspective is able to recognize that in some cases these incorporation processes create assertive, reformist, and resourceful citizens.

The Politics of Women's Economic Independence

Huber, E., Stephens, J. D., Bradley, D., Moller, S., Nielsen, F. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:42:29 PST

We identify the political conditions that shape the economic position of married/cohabiting women and of the economically most vulnerable group of women—single mothers. Specifically, we examine the determinants of reductions in single mothers' poverty rate due to taxes and transfers, and women's wages relative to spouses'/ partners' wages. The Luxembourg Income Study archive yields an unbalanced panel with 71 observations on 15 countries. The principal determinants of poverty reduction due to taxes and transfers are left government, constitutional veto points, and welfare generosity. The relative wage of women in couples is a function mainly of female labor force participation, part time work among women, and women's mobilization. In explaining the causal pathways to these outcomes, we highlight the interrelationships of welfare state, care, and labor market policies.

Making the Implicit Explicit: Gender Influences on Social Spending in Twelve Industrialized Democracies, 1980-99

Bolzendahl, C. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:42:29 PST

Despite the theoretical relevance of gender influences and a body of gender and feminist literature demonstrating the importance of changing gender relations on social policy, quantitative analyses have been slow to incorporate their impact. Thus, little is known about the importance of gender-specific measures in comparison to more established influences, or about the relative impact of the differing potential gendered pressures themselves. To address this gap, I theorize gender-relevant measures in economic, family, and political arenas, and appraise them alongside established influences. Though influences from each sphere emerge as consequential, the effects are not equal. Results across twenty years and twelve industrialized democracies show that women's legislative presence has the strongest overall effect, but spending outcomes are the most generous when all gender influences work in conjunction. Implications of these results for extending welfare state theory and research are discussed.

Gender and Occupation in Market Economies: Change and Restructuring Since the 1980s

Webb, J. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:42:29 PST

This paper compares employment restructuring, gender, and occupational change in Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USA, since the 1980s. Its analytical framework is derived from feminist debates about the relative influence of political–economic skill regimes and cultural ideologies of gender on occupational sex segregation. In each country, the shift towards services has further concentrated men's dominance of employment in extractive and transformative industries. Pre-existing patterns of occupational segregation between the sexes have not however been universally reinforced. A degree of occupational upgrading has facilitated women's movement into a growing range of professional and managerial occupations, but the extent of economic opportunity for women is not a simple function of labor market economics. The social–democratic, egalitarian values and policies of Sweden, for example, seem to have offered greater economic benefits to women than the more individualized, liberalized labor market policies of the UK. In conclusion, it is argued that gender and markets are mutually constitutive; their evolution is not pre-given but subject to political choices informed by history and culture.

Work-Life Balance: A Case of Technical Disempowerment?

McManus, R. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:42:29 PST

Work–life balance (WLB) is an emblematic strategy to achieve well-being for Third Way governments around the world and an exercise in nurturing self-actualizing and entrepreneurial citizens. By reading a case study of New Zealand's Labour WLB project through a poststructuralist perspective, I demonstrate that Third Way WLB policy projects are technical exercises in ethicalization. These practices serve to de-contextualize and de-politicize the terrain of well-being. This analysis highlights a contradiction in Third Way agendas to address the well-being of the needy because they disempower those they seek to empower.

Racializing the "Social Development" State: Investing in Children in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Elizabeth, V., Larner, W. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:42:30 PST

This paper focuses on the claim that the child is emerging as a key figure of social governance. International studies suggest that as liberal welfare states increasingly draw on social investment discourse, the child—particularly the child-as-worker-in-becoming—has emerged as an iconic figure. This has resulted in the child becoming the central subject of social policies and programs and the focus of new spending priorities. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, however, the figure of the child is much less prominent than elsewhere. Moreover, in the policies and programs of the New Zealand "social development" state, the child is often racialized by virtue of its location within specific family groupings and geographical communities. In turn, this has implications for the positioning of women. As we show, the child/mother who stands to benefit from the "investments" of social development in Aotearoa/New Zealand is actually more likely to be a Pakeha child/mother, whereas the child/mother requiring continued programmatic intervention is more likely to be Maori or Pacific. This finding points to the need for feminist scholars to examine further the complex interpenetration of gender and race/ethnicity in the shaping of contemporary socio-political landscapes.