Hege Skjeie

Political Constructions of Gender Equality: Travelling Towards … a Gender Balanced Society?

The article discusses equal rights to equal participation and public policies for gender balance in different societal arenas. Although gender balance is a central aim of official Norwegian gender equality politics, male hegemony is the dominant feature in most institutional settings of leadership, power and influence. This inconsistency is rhetorically handled through travel metaphors of gender equality and utility arguments about womens contributions to public life. Gender equality then becomes a question of time, and of how society would profit from “more” gender equality. The rights perspective is distorted. In the final part of the article, we discuss alternative, normative, approaches: gender balance in relation to parity in participation, a distributive norm of simple equality, and principles of non‐discrimination.

Scandinavian Feminist Debates on Citizenship

The Scandinavian notion of citizenship is based upon a strong participatory tradition. A broad notion of democracy includes not only formal political institutions but also the activities of social movements and voluntary associations in civil society. In social democratic citizenship, tension thus persists between traditions of governance where consensus-building is mediated through centralized corporate negotiations between major economic organizations, and an egalitarian, participatory tradition based on movement activism.

Religious Exemptions to Equality

Abstract The political role of religious value systems poses a great challenge in the perspective of safeguarding women’s citizenship rights. This applies to all the contexts where religious law defines civil, political and social rights and obligations in a manner that systematically promotes differential treatment of women and men, girls and boys. It also applies within the framework of secular laws that protect religious freedom such that discrimination becomes a religious group right. My concern in this article is with the limits to equal citizenship that this latter kind of religious accommodation may pose. I discuss some well‐known commonalities between claims to group accommodation which follow from multiculturalism’s minority‐rights reasoning, and claims to accommodation which, quite independent of ‘minority’–‘majority’ statuses, follow from interpretations of the right to freedom of religion. Such accommodations are of particular relevance to the Norwegian state/religion regime, which forms the ‘case’ under discussion here. One specific aspect of citizenship is thus in focus: the contestations over the legal protection of women’s rights to non discrimination, when confronted with the protection of the right to religious freedom.

Intersectionality in practice? Anti-discrimination reforms in Norway

Over the last decade there has been a significant broadening of the legal protection against discrimination in Norway. Adding to a comparatively strong gender equality legislation, the protection against discrimination has been expanded through a series of legal regulations to cover ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, disability and age, quite in line with recent EU developments and with the gradual strengthening of the international human rights regime. A major concern regarding these reform processes is the extent to which multiple and/or intersectional forms of discrimination are adequately addressed. In this article we examine the position of intersectional framings in recent legislative and monitoring reforms, and through the judicial practice of the new monitoring agencies. Multiple ground complaints constitute a minor, but increasing part of the cases handled by the Norwegian Equality and Anti-discrimination Ombud and the adjudicating Equality Tribunal. A closer examination of selected cases shows how there is a scale of possible conceptualizations of the ‘discrimination problem’ at hand which is open in the sense that cases of multiple discrimination could move into an area of intersectional problematic.

Quotas, Parity, and the Discursive Dangers of Difference

An unequal distribution of decision-making positions remains a largely shared tradition of liberal democracies.1 Brief glimpses into gender representation statistics of both national and international decision-making structures reveal institutional practices that have proven difficult to change. But these practices are increasingly being recognized for what they are, problems of democracy. Debates on political representation have multiplied in both national politics and at United Nations, European Union, and Council of Europe conferences and commissions. In many European parties a new set of ineasures has been introduced to promote access for women to decision-making bodies, ranging from target figures (via quotas) to ticket balancing. In France, the parity movement has obtained an amendment to the French constitution that simply and boldly asserts the equal right of access to decision-making, a principle that in turn is to be applied through detailed regulations of political nomination and election processes.

‘Gender Equality’: On Travel Metaphors and Duties to Yield

Securing gender equality is an ongoing democratic challenge. The ‘culture of equals’ is intrinsic to democracy, as Anne Phillips (2004) has written: democracy involves an assertion about the fundamental equality of all human beings and an expectation that this will be reflected in public policies and law. Principles of gender equality are written into international covenants, national constitutions, laws and bureaucratic guidelines. But how gender equality actually translates into law and public policies is highly controversial politics. Gender equality is conceived of in various ways. But all kinds of gender equality politics contain battles over rights, recognition, participation and distribution.

The changing nature of European equality regimes: explaining convergence and variation

This paper maps the changing nature of European equality regimes in order to establish the extent of variation or convergence across Europe and to evaluate the role of transnational policy paradigms and state-level institutions in shaping the emerging European equality regimes. We identify two significant tendencies in respect to European equality institutional regimes. First, a growing complexity in the institutional arrangements designed to address inequalities, with pre-2000 institutional arrangements increasingly augmented by newer equality institutions that adopt a judicialized approach to dealing with inequalities. Second, a Europe-wide tendency to widen the scope of equality policy thinking from a very small number of privileged inequality grounds (most frequently gender and ethnicity) to a much wider range of inequalities to be addressed by state policies. The overall impact of these two changes has been to create equality regimes characterized by a wide variety of forms and levels of protection for the different inequalities. This suggests that while a transnational policy paradigm has framed the evolving nature of equality regimes across Europe, the implementation of this paradigm is moulded by the power dynamics embedded in national and local equality institutions, creating a fragmented and complex patchwork of equality regimes that defy easy regional classification and complicate overly generalized narratives about the influence of global policy paradigms.

Institutionalizing Intersectionality: A Theoretical Framework

This collection focuses on the politics of multiple inequalities in Europe. It does so from the perspective of prior gender equality policy. It aims to evaluate the ways in which multiple inequalities are being addressed institutionally in Europe, and to identify the changing patterns of institutionalization. Using country-based and region-specific case studies the collection offers a comparative analysis of the multidimensional equality regimes that are emerging in Europe, and analyses the potential that these have for ‘institutionalizing intersectionality’.

European Equality Regimes: Institutional Change and Political Intersectionality

The analysis offered in the preceding chapters reveals that the past decade has been characterized by a tremendously dynamic European equality institutional arena. There have been ground-breaking changes, both in what is meant by equality policy and with respect to its institutionalization. These changes have occured at both a domestic and a European Union level. This volume has sought to capture this dynamic and to consider its likely implications for the emergence of a more intersectional approach to equality policy. Each of the chapters in the volume has addressed three key issues, to which we now return by way of conclusion, in order to draw out the comparative lessons embedded within the individual case studies.

The Scandinavian Model of Citizenship and Feminist Debates

Feminist debate on gendered citizenship in Scandinavia is strongly influenced by a specific social democratic model of the citizen. As a result, Scandinavian debates over political and social inclusion and exclusion assume an active conception of citizenship based on a positive perception of social movements as central agents of change. This notion of citizenship emphasizes the importance of collective action. What inspires the formation of collectives in the first place—whether injustices, identities, interests or issues—remains an open question. Social movements express a continuum of identifications ranging from ‘thick’ identities to ‘thin’ interests (or even ‘thinner’ issues), and they claim social and political rights for the groups they speak for and care about. The fairness of such claims must be justified normatively, but this justification occurs within processes of political mobilization and counter-mobilization. These political struggles occur within two distinct institutionally defined channels of political influence and power typical of social democratic systems: the numerical-democratic channel, and the corporate-pluralist channel (Rokkan, 1987). There is thus a tension in social democratic citizenship between an egalitarian, participatory tradition based on movement activism, and traditions of governance in which consensus-building is mediated through centralized corporate negotiations between major economic organizations.