Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in Dutch gender equality policy to an almost exclusive focus on migrant women. Simultaneously, the focus of 'minority policies' has shifted more and more towards gender relations. The appearance of migrant women at the top of the political agenda is remarkable. In this article we examine how this construction of migrant women as a political problem has come about, and consider its implications. As we argue, the dominant policy frames of emancipation and individual responsibility are reinforcing a dichotomy between the autochthonous 'us' and the allochthonous 'them'. As the problem is increasingly defined as a cultural one, it is implicitly stated that there is no problem with the dominant culture and society. Barriers for participation are exclusively located in the migrant (Muslim) culture. In this view, Muslim migrants should first change their culture before they can fully integrate in Dutch society.

While gender and ethnic inequality have been extensively studied in the context of organizations, research into how the intersection of these and other identity categories (re)produces inequality in organizations is still scarce. In this article, we examine inequality from an intersectional perspective in the context of a diverse and multifaceted organization: the Dutch police force. Using data collected through direct observation and focus groups, we analyse how organizational inequality is (re)produced and called into question by drawing on intersecting gender, ethnic and organizational identities. The analysis on the findings through an intersectional lens sheds light onto two paradoxes. The first paradox points to the fact that, by deploying more positive identities to empower themselves, individuals can de facto contribute to reproducing inequalities along those same identity axes. The second suggests, on the contrary, that acknowledging female and ethnic minority officers’ specific valuable competences calls into question inequality along gender and ethnicity within the executive police force. In analysing our material, we approach individuals as agents reflecting and engaging with intersecting identities and the unequal power relations deriving from them. We show that, while they occasionally openly challenge inequality derived from one’s social identity, they often actually reproduce it in order to preserve their own individual power.

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Trends of de-democratization across Europe and the Americas are emerging, along with opposition to gender equality and threats to previous gender equality policy gains. Yet de-democratization has been barely analysed through the lens of gender equality, and so far, efforts to systematically analyse the implications for inclusive democracy and the representation of gender interests are lacking. Backsliding in gender policies, and new forms of feminist engagement with hostile states and publics, also raise new challenges to the literature on gender and politics. In this article we explore gender equality policy backsliding in fragile democracies. Backsliding and de-democratization processes in these contexts pose a series of important challenges to how we have thought about gender policy change in progressive, mainly Western democratic contexts until now. We propose a conceptual framework discussing these two conceptually interesting realms: backsliding in gender equality policies, and feminist responses to backsliding. We illustrate our framework with empirical observations from four backsliding or temporarily backsliding Central and Eastern European countries: Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. With our article we aim to contribute to the understanding of gendered aspects of de-democratization both in gender and politics literature and in mainstream democratization literature.