SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 5: Gender Equality
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International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.
This article aims to understand what happens when gender equality policies cross prison walls – a challenging domain that has traditionally been invisibilised and ignored in the scholarship on gender and politics. By analysing the formulation and post-adoption phases in Spain, four main conclusions are drawn: first, the formulation phase has been highly impacted by the absence of the feminist movement and gender experts, resulting in the adoption of traditional views about the nature and needs of women; second, the lack of knowledge about, or disagreement with, the goals of the public policies activates forms of resistance that block attempts to advance; third, the ideas included in policy documents can be ‘fixed’ in the implementation phase and can eventually shape future courses of action; and, finally, the persistent absence of the feminist movement in the post-adoption phase results in the lack of opportunities to change the course of action towards a more transformative path.
Although we often speak about a global increase in awareness and policy on street harassment, in France, the issue was incorporated into a gender-based violence policy subsector, while Dutch policymakers avoided vocabularies pertaining to structural male domination. Differences in governmental campaigns on street harassment were the result not only of policymakers’ positive convictions, but also of their ‘apprehensions’. Apprehension of ‘moralising’ led to resistance against and decline of feminism in the Netherlands, while apprehension of ‘stigmatising’ men of colour informed campaigns in France. This notion is proposed as an alternative to that of ‘blame avoidance’, which reduces policymakers’ avoidance behaviour to the logic of instrumental strategy. An analysis of apprehensions is attentive to how ideas shape social action: policy implementation cannot be reduced to the mechanical reproduction of policy paradigms, but is often the product of policymakers’ reflective choices in the policies they do and do not want to pursue.
Initial fears of a standstill in political participation during the COVID-19 pandemic have not come true. Nevertheless, the voices heard in politics may have changed in such a radically altered social and political context. Specifically, the current article examines whether the gender gap in political participation has widened during the pandemic, reinforcing the gendered impact of the pandemic and state measures to cope with it. To empirically assess the development and drivers of the gender gap in political participation, we rely on original survey data for Germany collected in autumn 2020 and spring 2021. Based on retrospective questions about pre-pandemic behaviour and a within-pandemic panel, our results indicate three points: (1) the COVID-19 crisis has slightly increased the gender gap in participation; (2) COVID-19-related burdens (such as increasing care obligations) have not restrained, but fostered, participation; and (3) this mobilising effect is, however, stronger among men than women.
This thematic section seeks to contribute to emerging research on gender and policy that combines post-adoption and ideational approaches to address how and why ideas matter in gender equality policy implementation. In this article, the two research streams are first discussed. Next, the potential ingredients for gender transformation from current research are presented and then examined in the cases of post-adoption in Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, France and the Council of Europe in the four contributions to the thematic section. The concluding comparative assessment confirms what research has already found: the interplay between actors, ideas and institutions is crucial. Who comes forward and the ideas and political meanings those actors advance are what ultimately matter, dictated in certain policy sectors by the institutional micro-foundations of that domain. The article ends with the lessons learned from, and next steps that come out of, this thematic section.
Considering gender inequality in time as a resource for political participation and using Wave 5 of the European Social Survey data on 24 European countries, this study examines: (1) the relationship of both long working hours and unsociable work schedules to participation in national elections in Europe before or during 2010; (2) factors that may mediate this association; and (3) gender differences in this relationship and occupation-specific patterns. The findings show that both working more than 45 hours per week and working evenings, nights or weekends are associated with lower national electoral participation in women with both high and low occupational status. Among men with the lowest occupational status, working long hours is also linked to lower participation. These findings are robust against controlling for important confounders. Political interest seems to partially mediate the negative effect of unsociable work schedules on voting in women. Neither health nor social engagement plays a mediation role.
In this conclusion, we first sketch out some of the feminist lines of sight on protest camps that the preceding chapters open up before unpicking some of the different stories about feminist mobilisation that emerge from attention to its entanglement with camps. In this way, we show how the book not only engages with protest camps anew, in terms both of their constraints and their limitations, but also reimagines feminism and its relation to protest and camps. We close by briefly suggesting some lines of further inquiry.
In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, re-existencias and escrevivências occurring in movement collectives in Ceará, Northeast Brazil: Mãos que Criam, a women’s cooperative that forms part of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra Settlement, and three collectives of Afro-Brazilian women poets and artisans of the periphery of Fortaleza. We explore what the sharing of herstories of popular movements and collectives can illuminate regarding reoccupations and defence – not only of physical territories of the rural and urban landscapes but also of the political and of the emancipatory political subject herself. We consider the implications for the politics of knowledge of engaging with such praxis. We focus therefore on pluralising and provincialising conceptualisation, and foreground how this necessarily involves the decolonising of reason bound by modern/coloniality and the enfleshment of epistemology. In particular, we dwell and bring to thought in relation the concepts of the ‘feminisation of resistance’, escrevivência and the gramática da dor e alegria, and their interweaving with the concept and practice of reoccupation.
