Gender Mainstreaming - What is It Represented to Be? A discourse analysis of how gender mainstreaming is constructed on a municipal level
(2014) WPMM40 20141Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- When talking about gender equality work in public sector in Sweden two words come to mind, ‘gender’ and ‘mainstreaming’. Gender mainstreaming is Sweden’s official strategy to reach the national gender equality goals. Despite its popularity the strategy has received criticism for being too fixated on process and thus mainly focusing on methods, tools and policy instruments instead of addressing the real inequality problems.
In this thesis how gender equality and gender mainstreaming is discursively constructed on a municipal level is studied. The reason behind the focus on discourse is due to an assumption that how problems are discussed and represented will affect what solutions are proposed to solve these problems. By analyzing policy... (More) - When talking about gender equality work in public sector in Sweden two words come to mind, ‘gender’ and ‘mainstreaming’. Gender mainstreaming is Sweden’s official strategy to reach the national gender equality goals. Despite its popularity the strategy has received criticism for being too fixated on process and thus mainly focusing on methods, tools and policy instruments instead of addressing the real inequality problems.
In this thesis how gender equality and gender mainstreaming is discursively constructed on a municipal level is studied. The reason behind the focus on discourse is due to an assumption that how problems are discussed and represented will affect what solutions are proposed to solve these problems. By analyzing policy documents and interviews in two municipalities that are considered to be successful in their implementation with gender mainstreaming, it is found that the discourse in these municipalities is considerably different from how the criticism portrays the strategy. I argue this result to be significant since how gender problems are described in the municipalities will likely have an effect on how they are dealt with. Without making any further generalizations I also argue that the result opens up for a debate about what gender mainstreaming can and should be. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/4586881
- author
- Mäki, Nima LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- WPMM40 20141
- year
- 2014
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Gender Mainstreaming, Discourse Analysis, What’s the Problem? Approach, Problem Representation, Gender Equality
- language
- English
- id
- 4586881
- date added to LUP
- 2014-09-17 13:18:50
- date last changed
- 2014-09-17 13:18:50
@misc{4586881,
abstract = {{When talking about gender equality work in public sector in Sweden two words come to mind, ‘gender’ and ‘mainstreaming’. Gender mainstreaming is Sweden’s official strategy to reach the national gender equality goals. Despite its popularity the strategy has received criticism for being too fixated on process and thus mainly focusing on methods, tools and policy instruments instead of addressing the real inequality problems.
In this thesis how gender equality and gender mainstreaming is discursively constructed on a municipal level is studied. The reason behind the focus on discourse is due to an assumption that how problems are discussed and represented will affect what solutions are proposed to solve these problems. By analyzing policy documents and interviews in two municipalities that are considered to be successful in their implementation with gender mainstreaming, it is found that the discourse in these municipalities is considerably different from how the criticism portrays the strategy. I argue this result to be significant since how gender problems are described in the municipalities will likely have an effect on how they are dealt with. Without making any further generalizations I also argue that the result opens up for a debate about what gender mainstreaming can and should be.}},
author = {{Mäki, Nima}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Gender Mainstreaming - What is It Represented to Be? A discourse analysis of how gender mainstreaming is constructed on a municipal level}},
year = {{2014}},
}