Gender and Politics

This book examines the phenomenon of sexual harassment in the UK Parliament and efforts to tackle it. The volume’s in-depth research unveils a political culture where sexual transgressions thrive. Its intersectional feminist perspective furthermore highlights multiple systems of gendered oppression perpetuating inequality. Britain’s experience is viewed against the global #MeToo movement and Hollywood’s Weinstein sex scandal. The book identifies ways to redress the status quo and challenges ahead, including a gender power gap, misuse of non-disclosure agreements to silence victims, and misogynistic organisational cultures.

This book explores the reproduction of gender ‘beneath the spectacle’ – that is, beneath ceremonial displays of power, in the UK House of Commons. Contributing to a fascinating literature on gender and parliaments, the book conceives of the House of Commons as a workplace, as well as a representative arena. It explores the everyday consequences for gendered power relations that this unique environment entails, as parliamentary actors perform their careers, citizenship, and public service.

This book investigates the relation between left-wing populism and feminist politics by analysing three specific aspects. First, whether left-wing populist parties promote gender equality policies, against charges of a general inconsistency between both political projects; Second, how do these parties form their policy-making coalitions in the field of gender equality; Third, how much impact on policy do women’s movements have when left-wing populists are in power. The book is focused on the case of Bolivia during the first twelve years of Evo Morales's presidency. The empirical analysis is based on the qualitative content analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews with women’s movements’ activists, policy-makers and experts in women’s movements. The central issue of the book is present throughout the volume, but each empirical chapter can be also read as a semi-autonomous analysis of a specific aspect of the relation between left-wing populism and feminist politics, which increases the interest of the book for different audiences including experts in gender and politics and feminist activists, specialists in Latin American politics, indigenous politics and social movements.

The face of international politics has changed significantly in the 21st century: it has become increasingly female. Whether that includes women in multilateral meetings, global conferences and embassies, or women at the UN and one of its many agencies in the field, it is apparent that women are accessing leadership positions in a variety of areas. This book investigates the development of gender equality at the United Nations by analyzing women in leadership roles. This introduction of empirical feminism to the study of international organizations applies what is known about women’s participation and representation in comparative politics and gender studies to the United Nations System. It traces women’s access to leadership roles, and explains where and why a range of hurdles prevent women from participating in the work of the UN. In doing so, it offers insights into recruitment and human resources practices and their politics, and into leadership by bureaucratic actors.

This edited collection explores how party politics impacts the implementation of gender quotas in political representation across Europe. Contributors identify actors, institutions, and cultural legacies shape how quotas are put into practice. The volume’s subtitle, Resisting Institutions, points to the myriad ways in which parties and other institutions in Europe over time have resisted the inclusion of women into politics. As voluntary party quotas and legislative quotas gained prominence, so did strategies to undermine them. At the same time, Resisting Institutions also indicates that gender equality actors have developed ways to counter such blockages and advance the cause of parity in their legislatures. 17 country cases explore the current state of quota implementation and the effects of confronting androcentric institutions. 

This book breaks new ground in gender and politics research by studying the multiple ways in which gender and intersectional equalities shape and are shaped by social partners representing employers and employees in Europe, as well as the relationships between those social partners. Little critical attention has been paid to these organizations, yet, as this volume illustrates, social partners are important actors in relation to gender and other inequalities at the level of both individual European countries and the European Union. The chapters in this volume explore the impact of social partners on (in)equalities in a variety of 21^st-century political contexts, taking into account phenomena such as neoliberalisation, austerity, and the COVID-19 crisis. This volume adds a crucial dimension to studies on gender inequalities in the labour market, contributing to research on issues such as domestic work, the gender pay gap, and the persistent undervaluation of women’s labour and feminized reproductive labour, in particular care work. It also represents a significant contribution to the literature on gender equality policy. The book’s focus on social partners provides important insights that help to explain the persistence of gender inequalities and the difficulties of adopting and implementing policies to combat them. This volume should appeal to students and researchers of gender studies, politics, European politics, employment relations, and international relations, as well as to policymakers engaged in addressing gender inequalities in the labour market.

This book explores the triangular dynamics of securitisation and desecuritisation that underpin the EU’s approach to trafficking in women for sexual exploitation. That is, the progressive securitisation of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation within the EU’s anti-trafficking policies and the existence of two distinct and competing approaches that coexist among feminist struggles against such trend and that largely follow the two opposing views that structure feminist debates on prostitution: a neo-abolitionist approach, on the one hand, that is increasingly defended from within EU institutions, and has therefore become increasingly entangled with the securitisation of trafficking in women; and a sex work approach, on the other hand, that has been largely relegated to the domains of academia and civil society. As such, this book addresses the intersection of security and feminist neo-abolitionism within the EU’s anti-trafficking policies, as well as the de-securitising potential of the anti-trafficking advocacy of both neo-abolitionist and sex worker organisations operating at EU level. This book is unique in that it unprecedentedly brings together three bodies of literature that rarely interact: Critical Security Studies, EU Gender Studies and the feminist literature on prostitution and trafficking in women and demonstrates their fruitful interaction in an extensive empirical analysis of the EU’s internal security, violence against women and anti-trafficking policies.  

This book analyses the effects of public governance reforms on gender equality policy in Finland. Recent economic crises, rising austerity and increasing opposition to gender equality have led to the defunding of gender equality bodies, and the side-lining of gender equality as a political goal. This policy backlash has taken place alongside transformations to the state and governance, that have changed the discourses, knowledge, actors, and practices of gender equality policy. This book contributes to these discussions by demonstrating the subtleties of the constantly changing governance reform agendas, their operation in practice, and how they intertwine with other elements of the gender equality policy backlash. It is based on more than 100 interviews with civil servants, politicians, non-governmental organisations, social partners, and think tanks, and a broad range of policy documents and media material. It will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, public policy and governance.

This book reflects on the centennial of women's suffrage in the Nordic region and beyond, by exploring its relevance to political gender equality today and the conditions for feminist institutional change. The book brings together historians and political scientists to provide a long-term historical perspective that lays the groundwork for theoretical development. In this regard, the book makes two key contributions: it furthers our understanding of different types of gendered institutional constraints on women’s political inclusion and elaborates feminist institutional strategies to counter these constraints.

This open access book shows how the #MeToo movement and revelations of sexual harassment and bullying have spurred on reform of the parliamentary workplace in four Westminster countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK.  Long-standing conventions included extreme power imbalances between parliamentarians and staff and a lack of professionalised employment practices. Codes of conduct and independent complaints bodies were resisted on grounds of parliamentary privilege: the ballot box was supposedly the best means of holding parliamentarians accountable for their conduct. The taken-for-granted status of adversarial politics and its silencing effects also rendered gendered mistreatment invisible.   The authors examine the institutional backdrop and the different trajectories of reform in the four countries, with most detail on the dramatic developments in Australia after angry women marched on parliament houses in 2021. They show how the different parliaments have responded to escalating evidence of misconduct, the role of policy borrowing, and the possibilities of lasting institutional change.

Drawing on theories in politics, sociology, gender and feminist studies, and social movement studies, this book compares and contrasts NGOized feminist organizations and informal street feminist groups in Belgium and Romania in order to understand the transformation of modern and contemporary feminist movements. Chapters trace the development of this NGOization process and its entanglements with neoliberal modes of governance and techniques and proposes an historically and empirically grounded analytical model to studying the NGOization of feminist movements as a multidimensional process. By analyzing the NGOization process through a cross-national comparison based on very different cases, the book disentangles the links between institutionalization, professionalization, bureaucratization and precarization and brings clarifications concerning the outcomes associated with them, such as demobilization, depoliticization, co-optation and burn-out. This book places the NGOization offeminist movement organizations within the specific context of relations between the state and the market in neoliberalism.

This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers across Gender & Feminist Studies, Social Movements, Sociology, and Politics.

This volume illustrates and analyses the stereotypes and prejudices underlying the social representation of violence against women as it is narrated and described in Italy by the press and by court judgements. After a theoretical reflection on the role of culture and socialisation in reproducing the conditions underlying gender-based violence and its normalisation, and after reconstructing the historical evolution of gender roles and the stages of women’s condition, the book presents the results of a sociological and of a socio-linguistic analysis on a vast corpus of 16,715 newspaper articles published by fifteen Italian newspapers on gender crimes (specifically: femicide; sexual violence; domestic violence; women trafficking) . The chapters analyze how national, macro-regional and local Italian press narrates violence against women but they also analyze a  repertoire of 283 judicial sentences. The results show a clear tendency to redistribute the responsibilities of these crimes between the perpetrator and the victim, leading not only to secondary victimization but also to tertiary victimization, affecting the quality of Italian institutions as well as the democratic fiber of the nation.

The volume finally includes a compendium of the best and the worst practices found in the corpuses of sentences and newspapers’ articles and a set of recommendations addressed to the institutional actors and journalists for a correct representation of gender-based violence, free from those stereotypes and prejudices that violate the dignity of male violence’ victims and prevent them from accessing justice.

This open access book provides the first in-depth study of the development of federal gender equality politics and policy in Australia from the 1970s to the present day. Australia has a history of gender equality innovation, including granting women's suffrage long before equivalent countries. From the 1970s on, it became the first country to introduce a women's adviser, femocrats (feminist bureaucrats) and gender responsive budgeting but then fell behind, partly due to the influence of Anglosphere neoliberalism. However, the Albanese government has pledged to make Australia a world leader in gender equality again. The book situates Australia in an international context, assessing the useful, though sometimes salutary, lessons which the Australian experience provides. It engages with key literature, including feminist political theory, discursive framing analysis, gendered public policy analysis, LBGTIQ+ issues, path dependency, and gender and leadership. It will interest academics, undergraduate and postgraduate researchers, public policy experts and practitioners, and a broader readership interested in issues of gender equality. The book makes innovative contributions to the study of the politics of gender equality policy, addressing what a gender equality policy agenda could look like if the needs of women, in all their intersectional social diversity, were the driving force. In doing so, it addresses a range of issues that are impacting the future of women, including an ongoing pandemic, technology, education and training agendas, issues of sovereign capability, securitisation, climate change and the growth of campaigns that oppose so-called “gender ideology”. It explores how current government agendas, such as the focus on wellbeing, could be made even more gender-inclusive. Finally, the book suggests that Australia, as a multicultural but predominantly Western, settler-colonial society situated in the Asia-Pacific has some potentially unique insights to offer in a world facing major geoeconomic and geopolitical change.