Gender Analysis and Social Change: Testing the Water

Abstract

This paper uses preliminary findings from an ARC-funded Linkage grant to speculate on the requirements for producing gender analysis as a change process. Gender analysis, commonly associated with gender mainstreaming, is a methodology aimed at ensuring that all projects, programs and policies are gender-inclusive and gender-sensitive. In the Linkage study existing models of gender analysis taken from Canada and The Netherlands are being tested for their usefulness in selected agencies in South Australia and Western Australia. The goal is to design gender analysis processes appropriate to specific Australian contexts. This paper reflects on the challenges and obstacles encountered in the project to date. It focuses in particular on the importance of creating space for extended debate and discussion of the concepts and issues relevant to gender equality and social change. The authors describe this space as “somewhere in the middle”.

Recalibrating Management: Feminist Activism to Achieve Equality in an Evolving University

“…Today at the WU, equality is on the agenda but it is peripheral, and its enactment is dependent on discretionary individual efforts. As Bacchi et al (2006) observed, equality as an academic agenda, as advocated by the FC, has been narrowly incorporated into projects such as teaching and research among a small number of individuals within small teaching groups in two (Management and Economics) of the 11 University departments, as well as two scholarships awarded to female faculty.…”

What's the problem with gender‐based analysis? Gender mainstreaming policy and practice in Canada

“…We therefore have no sense of how systematic distortions filter into the analysis, reinforcing rather than resisting axes of oppression. Thus, gender‐based analysis becomes a mode of “othering” (see also Bacchi et al 2005; Carney 2005).…”

“…Another key issue with gender-based analysis is its tendency to privilege gender as the primary axis of oppression, neglecting the complexities of social location, understood as the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, ability and so on (Bacchi et al 2005;Bacchi and Eveline 2003;Hankivsky 2005Hankivsky , 2007Teghtsoonian 2000; for discussions of ''intersectionality'' and policy studies, see Manuel 2006 andVerloo 2006). Indeed, despite its potential (and explicit commitment) to consider multiple axes of difference (Rankin and Vickers 2001), gender-based analysis has yet to grapple with the complexities of identity, including the ways in which gender mainstreaming itself produces and reproduces gender, thereby reducing its potential to transform social relations.…”

“…This not only reinforces the notion of a gender binary, a claim that has been convincingly problematized by post-structuralist feminists, but also assumes that women share a common experience on the basis of their sex/gender (see, most notably, Judith Butler 1990). This claim has also been problematized by difference feminists (see, for example, Crenshaw 1991; Hooks 2000; and in the context of mainstreaming, see Bacchi and Eveline 2003;Bacchi et al 2005;Hankivsky 2005Hankivsky , 2007 and neglects the ways in which ''gender'' is mediated by social location. Moreover, in adopting ex poste analysis, gender-based analysis takes differences based on sex as given rather than interrogating how such differences are given meaning through discursive politics (Bacchi and Eveline 2003).…”

“…After providing a brief overview of gender mainstreaming in Canada, I apply the approach of problem representation to gender mainstreaming to critically explore the ways in which current policy and practice discursively construct the policy space. I argue that gender mainstreaming constructs a new form of worker: the “gender expert” who is then given authority to analyse, monitor and suggest interventions based on “expert analysis” (see also Bacchi et al 2005: 63; Carney 2005). Thus, gender analysis becomes a “technology of rule,” constructing gender experts whose power ultimately goes unscrutinized in the context of the organization, thereby obscuring the ways in which gender systems are reproduced or fractured by gender mainstreaming itself.…”