The Pregnant Worker and Caring Mother: Framing Family Policies across Europe

Gender mainstreaming is designed to address the social roles of both women and men. How are men included in gender equality policies? I conduct an analysis of all gender equality strategies and annual reports of the European Commission – a global leader in this field – since 1982. I find that, since the mid 1990s, the Commission has included men as contributors to gender equality (‘problem solvers’). Yet, men’s disadvantages in education and health were only addressed between 2006 and 2015. Later on, men’s problems have been ignored, as they have been increasingly portrayed as a uniformly privileged group, undeserving of European policies. This withdrawal from addressing men’s problems exposes the tension between legitimising policies for one group (women) and addressing the needs of a complementary group (men). A novel approach to gender equality policies should revive the global debate on their meaning and implications. My findings also raise new questions about the power of the European Commission to construct policy target populations.

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Discursive Dynamics in Gender Equality Politics

Lombardo

Meier

Verloo

2010

European Journal of Women's Studies

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Discursive dynamics play an important role in shaping the meanings of gender equality. The article discusses the relation between hegemonic discourses on gender equality policies and feminist taboos. It suggests that feminist scholars could paradoxically be trapped in hegemonic discourses on gender equality policies that may lead to taboos about particular approaches to and interpretations of such policies. Three main feminist hegemonic discourses are considered to act as taboos. They deal with the possibility to overcome patriarchy, the role of elites and other groups of actors in processes of gender transformation and the merits of incremental change. The article further discusses the implications of the postulate about hegemonic discourses and taboos on gender equality for feminist knowledge production and reflects on the potential of Bacchi's notion of 'reflexivity' to overcome them.

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The Pregnant Worker and Caring Mother: Framing Family Policies across Europe

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Prospects and Challenges for Discursive-Sociological Studies of the Europeanization of Equality Policies

Prospects and Challenges for Discursive-Sociological Studies of the Europeanization of Equality Policies

Men in European Union’s gender equality policies

Discursive Dynamics in Gender Equality Politics

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