“A bulletin board of dreams”: corporate empowerment promotion and feminist implications

This article examines the premises of corporate solutions to gender inequality in the Global South. In feminist debates, businesses’ increasing emphasis on women’s empowerment has been discussed both in terms of increasing feminist impact and the co-optation of feminist demands. To explore the ideological effects of corporate gender practices, focus is placed on the Coca-Cola Company’s global “5by20” campaign, which has the stated aim to empower five million women as small-scale entrepreneurs around the world and, in a “win–win” fashion, to double sales by 2020. Based on interviews and participatory observations in Mexico, this article traces a particular narrative of empowerment, envisioned as a transition from dependency to self-sufficiency and threatened by psychological and cultural restraints rather than material conditions. It shows that self-help and positive thinking are essential affective drives, thus reinforcing market-based, individualized development strategies. In response to feminist debates, the article concludes that corporate gender practices can be seen as part of a neoliberal transposition of equality concerns from a political to an economic domain. In effect, when initiatives such as 5by20 promote the accumulation of “human capital” to enhance gender equality, they simultaneously work to legitimize the inequalities that are necessarily entailed in competitive capitalism.     

The “Places and Non-places” Held by Women in Social Economy Organizations

Scientific literature and facts have highlighted the perpetuation of gender inequality in the labour market in spite of the ongoing endeavours of political bodies and legal norms to eliminate the vertical and horizontal segregation of women. Portuguese Social Economy Act stresses “the respect for the values […] of equality and non-discrimination […], justice and equity […]”. In this paper, we offer a reflection on indicators that uncover vertical and horizontal segregation in the labour market. Based on a mixed methodological approach, we found very high rates of employment feminization in social economy organizations. Women are mainly allocated to technical and operational activities, being ultimately underrepresented in statutory boards and as such excluded from deliberation and strategic decision. The sector is moving away from the ideals of justice and social equity and may preserve women’s “non-place” in the definition of the public and strategic direction and in the most invisible/private organizational “places”.     

Constructing Humanitarian Selves and Refugee Others

Contributing to ongoing debates about what happens when feminism is institutionalized in global governance, this article examines how gender equality is given meaning and applied in humanitarian aid to refugees, and what the implications are with regard to the production of subjectivities and their positioning in relations of power. Drawing on Foucauldian and postcolonial feminist perspectives, the analysis identifies two main representations of what it means to promote gender equality in refugee situations. Gender equality is represented as a means to aid effectiveness through the strategic mobilization of refugee women's participation, and as a project of development, involving the transformation of “traditional” or “backward” refugee cultures into modern societies. The subject positions that are produced categorically cast refugees as either passive or problematic subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions, while humanitarian workers are positioned as rational administrators and progressive agents of social transformation. In effect, gender equality is used to sustain power asymmetries in refugee situations and to reproduce global hierarchies.     

A Reappraisal of the Quality of Women Candidates

Abstract

This article focuses on “second-wave” feminist perspectives on the role of the state and its effectiveness in removing gender-based inequality in Indian society. The major argument is that feminist rethinking of the relationship of women to the state illustrates the maturity of the Indian women's movement and its recognition that well-planned, mobilized, and effective state policies are crucial to the promotion of women's interests. Recent scholarship has addressed, more systematically and more critically than any in the past, the nexus between social and political processes and the subordination of women. It provides a contextualized and nuanced understanding of the complex interconnections between gender, state, religion, and community. Consequently, not only have feminist writings of the past two decades in India added to current gender sensitive scholarship on the state and development, they have also facilitated the construction of programmatic guides for realizing “strategic gender interests.”     

Editorial

This editorial introduces a journal devoted to the issues surrounding women and their rights. As the development debate moves from women's need to their rights and to an understanding of the cultural roots of legal systems and the effects of the mass media in presenting alternative life styles as possibilities, the immense implications of using rights-based language in development emerge. This debate moves women from being the recipients of welfare to a state of empowerment. Women must be afforded individual rights which are linked to community rights. In addition, rights must be granted to women in their public and private domains. The dangers of using a rights-based language to assert women's claims to economic, political, and social equality in economic, political, and social life arise from the reality that the social position of men will usually place men at an advantage with the law. Legal processes which stress dichotomies may fail to improve real social situations. Also, the language of human rights may pit one set of rights (a woman's right to choose abortion) against another (the fetuses' right to live) to women's disadvantage. Areas governed by both customary and civil law pose other difficulties, especially since they require women to understand the law in order to use it. Development efforts which stress rights hope to meet immediate needs and to achieve a strategic end. Nongovernmental organizations can play an important role in asserting and enforcing the freedom of individuals and groups within groups. They can also build capacity at all levels of society and explore linkages between women's economic participation, decision-making within the home, and wider political participation.     

The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”

This article traces the emergence of a politico-economic project of “transnational business feminism” (TBF) over the past decade. This project – which is being developed by a coalition of states, financial institutions, the UN, corporations, NGOs and others – stresses the “business case” for gender equality by arguing that investments made in women can (and should) be measured in terms of the cost savings to families and communities, as well as in terms of boosting corporate profitability and national competitiveness. This article uses a feminist historical materialist framework to argue that TBF is facilitating the further entrenchment of the power of corporations to create “expert” knowledges about both “gender” and “development.” Using the Nike-led “Girl Effect” campaign as an example, it is argued that TBF is promoting a naturalized and essentialized view of women and gender relations that ignores the historical and structural causes of poverty and gender-based inequality. It is also helping to reproduce the same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has created and sustained gender-based and other forms of oppression via the global feminization of labor, the erosion of support for social reproduction and the splintering of feminist critiques of capitalism.     

Policies as Gendering Practices: Re-Viewing Categorical Distinctions

ABSTRACT

For some time feminist scholars have been concerned with rethinking the constraints imposed on feminists’ strategies by categorical distinctions, such as the distinction between “women” and “men.” This issue has become more pressing due to a political commitment to recognize diversity among women and among men (consider here discussions of masculinities and intersectionality). This article offers the conceptualization of policies as gendering practices as a way to rethink categorical distinctions and to direct attention to how inequality is “done.” In this approach the focus shifts from considering how policies impact on women and men to asking how they constitute or make them come to be. More broadly, this contribution recommends the need to examine policies for their interacting, constitutive effects, asking how they are potentially gendering, racializing, heteronorming, classing, disabling, third-worldizing, etc.     

Political Inequality is International,Interdisciplinary, and Intersectional

Political inequality refers to the unequal influence over decisions made by political bodies and the unequal outcomes of those decisions. Political inequality is a subtype of power inequality, visible within the political processes of all kinds of political structures. In modern democracies, political inequality is simultaneously a dimension of democracy and a dimension of stratification. Two key theoretical and empirical questions are How much political inequality is there? and is political inequality rising, falling, or staying the same? The answer to these key questions requires us to specify the kind of political inequality – voice, response, and their subtypes – and whether we mean equality of political opportunities or of political outcomes. I argue that we need to understand better the form, duration, and magnitude of political inequality within and across nations. We need to study it systematically, continuously, and diligently, and in an inclusive, open‐minded way, inclining our ears to the varied contributions of the many academic disciplines. We should begin by studying political inequality as an international phenomenon and as an interdisciplinary enterprise, and from an intersectional approach.     

Funding Civil Society? Bilateral Government Support for Development NGOs

Research on the determinants of foreign aid tends to focus on the relationship between donor country priorities and recipient state characteristics, but donors also make decisions about which organizations and programs within countries will receive assistance. Although NGOs increasingly have been recipients of foreign aid, few data are available to investigate which organizations within a given country receive that funding. Donors may prioritize structural characteristics of NGOs or their local ties—or they may seek a combination that blends concern about efficiency and accountability with an interest in developing national civil society. We use original data from Cambodia to explore whether aid is likely to go to managerial organizations (professionalized NGOs and NGOs that utilize modern management tools) or to organizations that are embedded in the domestic context. We argue that managerialism provides legitimacy for NGOs by signaling capacity and accountability to donors, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We argue that local embeddedness also confers legitimacy by aligning community ties and networks to rights-based development, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We find general support for the managerialism argument, but donor agencies do not prioritize direct funding for “indigenous” NGOs—not even among those with high levels of managerialism.     

Developments in gender and U.S. politics: A call for intersectionality

Since “women and politics” scholarship emerged in the 1970s, social, institutional, and theoretical developments have shaped the trajectory of U.S. scholarship in this field. First, the presence of women in formal politics has increased, albeit unevenly across parties and minority groups over time. Simultaneously, the capacity to study “political women” has become supported through institutional mechanisms such as academic journals and communities of practice. Moreover, gender as a critical focus of analysis has been developed and refined. In the literature on women and politics, the shift from studying sex differences to interrogating gendered political institutions is especially salient. This institutional focus, along with recent intersectional studies of gender and politics, increases opportunities for cross‐pollination of sociological and political science perspectives. In this review, I provide a brief history of the U.S. scholarship on gender and politics and map these relevant social, institutional, and theoretical advances. I highlight the value of recent intersectional contributions in this field and make the case for bringing partisanship—an increasingly salient political identity and structure—into intersectional approaches to gender and politics.     

Girl Power,Mainstreaming and Critical Mass: Women's Leadership and Policy Paradigm Shift in Germany's Red-Green Coalition, 1998–20021

SUMMARY

Women's increased presence in German government since 1998 testifies to generational change, as well as to the completion of a gender-specific “long march through the institutions.” Securing more than 30% of the Bundestag seats, female lawmakers also reached critical mass in the Red-Green Cabinet, a coalition of the Social Democratic and Green Parties formed in 1998. This study of ministerial feminism, 1998–2002, shows that women are making a difference in Germany; these leaders have initiated paradigm shifts “bigger than the sum of the parts” insofar as national equality policies are reinforced at the European Union level, thanks to gender mainstreaming. Bolstered by new anti-discrimination articles in the Amsterdam Treaty, these women have undertaken strategic reforms in areas of gender and justice; research and technology; family and career; health, welfare and consumer protection; sustainable development, foreign aid, migration and human rights. Women have profited from supranational integration, in part because European Union decision-making builds on an inclusive concept of “power with,” in contrast to the traditional national exercise of “power over.”     

The “what” and “who” of co-optation: gendered racialized migrations,settler nation-states and postcolonial difference

In this article, I focus on the management of postcolonial difference and the production of belonging in a white settler nation-state in order to rethink the notion of co-optation. I first develop a theoretical framework for understanding co-optation by separating the “who” and the “what” of co-optation: actors who embody diversity in public, political debate become the “who” of co-optation, as their agency is shaped by gendered and racialized processes of subject making. The “what” of co-optation revolves around particular conceptualizations of practices, rights and freedoms, associated in this case with “gender equality,” which is rendered an empty signifier in the process. I then illustrate this framework by drawing from research on the Sharia-based arbitration debate that took place in Ontario, Canada, between late 2003 and early 2006. I focus on the claims of two Canadian Muslim women activists to show that co-optation occurs as attempts to further liberation instead advance illiberal practices.     

Still a “Stalled Revolution”? Work/Family Experiences,Hegemonic Masculinity,and Moving Toward Gender Equality

Hochschild described the “stalled revolution” in the late 1980s: women made great gains in labor force opportunities, particularly in stereotypically “masculine” fields, yet men did not move comparably into “feminine” roles. This article examines the current “stalls” in the gender equality movement regarding gendered experiences at work and home, including occupations, the gender wage gap, career trajectories, and the division of household labor. This article also discusses efforts to “unstall” the gender revolution. Pop culture solutions on the individual‐level and academic research on structural/cultural barriers often focus on women's access to historically “masculine” roles (e.g. representation in STEM fields). There is far less emphasis on men's involvement in historically “feminine” roles. Gender scholars examine hegemonic masculinity as the narrowly constrained expectations for men's “appropriate” behavior. While efforts to “unstall” the gender revolution focus largely on expanding women's opportunities, this article addresses why the gender revolution will remain incomplete and “stalled” without redefining hegemonic masculinity. Cross‐national research demonstrates that changing views of masculinity are critical for greater gender equality at work and home.     

Femininity is not inferiority: women-led civil society organizations and “countering violent extremism” in Nigeria

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, and the Millennium Development Goals, brought the inclusion of women in the security agenda into the international limelight. Although these global frameworks, and other international resolutions, underscore the importance of women’s participation in the politics of peace and security, Nigeria’s frameworks have not been inclusive. Extant literature has examined the role of women within the context of mainstream responsibilities for “counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency” that are held by the military and paramilitary forces. This study interrogates the role of women-led civil society organizations in “countering violent extremism” activities in Nigeria. Using a mixed-methods approach, it demonstrates that the participation of women-led civil society organizations in “countering violent extremism” activities has generated certain positive results for achieving women’s inclusion and gender equality in politics and society.     

The Incomplete Revolution

South Africa's negotiated transition promised significant gains for gender equality, as women acquired one-third of the seats in the national parliament, secured constitutional protection, and began a process of legislative and institutional reform. Once apartheid was dismantled, the programs of racial and gender empowerment theoretically should have proceeded at the same rates, given the rhetorical commitments of the liberation parties. Life for the majority of South African women, however, continues to be marked by socio-economic hardships, patriarchal domination, and gender violence. This article asserts that the roots of women's continued inequality are found within the western reform models utilized by the anti-apartheid movement that reproduced public/private, male/female dichotomies in state institutions, thereby entrenching male discourse and power. The data suggest that in order to disrupt the power of the patriarchy women need to challenge male domination within the domestic sphere as well as challenging gender discrimination in public political spaces.     

Women’s Political Firsts and Symbolic Representation

ABSTRACT

The extent to which politics is still a “man’s game” is made evident every time a top political office has a female holder for the first time. These incredibly revealing moments may give a new social meaning to women in politics—women’s political presence—and women and politics—gendered social constructions about women’s capacity to rule. This article explores the types of gendered mediation underpinning the representation of first-ever women serving in historically male-dominated political offices in Spain. It shows that gender media frames are pervasive, which may lead to an effective annihilation of women’s symbolic representation.     

Dichotomy of development aid’s ambition and neoliberal imperatives: A case‐study of private‐sector development in Bangladesh

Development in the twenty‐first century (“neo‐liberalism”) is a tool and its success and sustainability depend on how this tool is applied on a specific grounded reality. This article investigates how this modernization process continually co‐creates globalized Bangladesh through private sector development. While this field report highlights the challenges development aid donors can face in Bangladesh’s post‐colonial culture, it also unveils the dichotomous traction between globalization and inequality as well as the friction poverty reduction, through private sector development, can generate in impoverished countries. Finally, this report attempts to reconsider the ways in which the aid development ambitions of equality and liberty can find a workable balance with the neo‐liberal Imperative for private sector development. This article calls for improving quality control to generate greater impact of development aid resources in developing private sectors.     

Oral Sex,Young People,and Gendered Narratives of Reciprocity

Young people in many countries report gender differences in giving and receiving oral sex, yet examination of young people’s own perspectives on gender dynamics in oral heterosex are relatively rare. We explored the constructs and discourses 16- to 18-year-old men and women in England used in their accounts of oral sex during in-depth interviews. Two contrasting constructs were in circulation in the accounts: on one hand, oral sex on men and women was narrated as equivalent, while on the other, oral sex on women was seen as “a bigger deal” than oral sex on men. Young men and women used a “give and take” discourse, which constructed the mutual exchange of oral sex as “fair.” Appeals to an ethic of reciprocity in oral sex enabled women to present themselves as demanding equality in their sexual interactions, and men as supporting mutuality. However, we show how these ostensibly positive discourses about equality also worked in narratives to obscure women’s constrained agency and work with respect to giving oral sex.     

Human Rights-Based Child Sponsorship: A Case Study of ActionAid

Many NGOs which focus on development have operated child sponsorship programs due to their effectiveness in raising funds. Existing studies offer a critique of child sponsorship as a de-humanizing marketing strategy and as a targeted service provision. Some NGOs have revised their child sponsorship by integrating it with a rights-based approach (RBA), which emerged rejecting the individual focus and disempowering process of development intervention. The objection of other RBA NGOs to child sponsorship leaves questions about whether child sponsorship can fit an RBA. The aim of the present study is to explore how child sponsorship is perceived and practiced in relation to an RBA in an NGO. The findings from a case study of ActionAid present how an RBA guides ActionAid’s child sponsorship to promote empowerment, campaigning, solidarity and alternatives. This study identifies the potential of an RBA to address problematic marketing and operational practices of child sponsorship as well as remaining issues. The complexity of NGO practices when aligning organizational practices with an RBA warrants further examination.

     

Seeing the system: Systemic gender knowledge to support transformational change towards gender equality in science

Scholars agree that gender inequality is systemic and that participants in gender equality interventions need knowledge on gender inequality processes. However, a detailed view on the specific characteristics of this knowledge is as yet missing. This article aims to contribute to gender equality interventions by conceptualizing and visualizing systemic gender knowledge as an important condition for transformational change. Combining gender and participatory system dynamics literature, this article first introduces the concept of systemic gender knowledge. This concept captures two main characteristics that make gender knowledge systemic: knowledge on the interaction of gender inequality processes and endogenous thinking, here implying a focus on the organization as the relevant level of analysis. In addition to this conceptual contribution, the research contributes methodologically to the gender inequality intervention literature by designing a visualization process, translating written texts into system dynamics models which enable exploration of systemic gender knowledge. Finally, the research contributes empirically by exploring the systemic gender knowledge of participants in two science research institutes of a Dutch university, finding shifts in both characteristics of systemic gender knowledge. This enables researchers to discern whether gender equality interventions lead to increases in systemic gender knowledge, thus supporting transformational change.