by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton
Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring a range of our most popular, recent research on different aspects relating to gender policy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on gender policy or are interested in keeping up to date with the latest research in that area, we hope you will find the articles we’ve featured of interest!
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We are delighted to announce this year’s prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2024.
The Ken Young Prize for the best article judged to represent excellence in the field is awarded to Claire Dupont, Jeffrey Rosamond and Bishoy L. Zaki (University of Ghent, Belgium) for their article: Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy. Well deserved, Claire, Jeffrey, and Bishoy!
The Bleddyn Davies Prize recognising scholarship of the very highest standard by an early career academic, is awarded to Leah McCabe, University of Edinburgh, UK for her article: An intersectional analysis of contestations within women’s movements: the case of Scottish domestic abuse policymaking. Congratulations Leah!
In celebration of these winning articles, the co-editors’ elucidate the distinct and important contributions these articles make to their fields.
Continue readingby Sophie Jacquot
UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles
In my recently published article in Policy & Politics, I ask how and why equal pay remains on the EU agenda, and, relatedly, if policy failure can be useful in policymaking.
Equal pay for equal work between women and men has been enshrined in European treaties since 1957. It is one of the EU’s founding principles, and, even though the EU’s action against gender inequalities has expanded to include areas as varied as domestic violence, integration of gender equality in external relations, gender budgeting or the articulation between private and working life, equal pay certainly remains the flagship and most symbolic policy domain of the EU gender equality policy. Equal pay can be considered as an identity marker for the EU. Implementing the principle of equal pay has regularly been on the European policy-making agenda since the 1970s with new legislation, case law, soft regulation, etc. However, the gender pay gap in the EU is 13% in 2022. It means that women would need to work 1.5 extra months to make up the difference. It also means that progress in closing the gender pay gap is extremely slow: it decreased by only 2.8% pp in 10 years.
Source: Extract from Equal Pay? Time to close the gap! (European Commission, November 2022, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2022-11/equal_pay_day_factsheet_2022_en_1_0.pdf). Reproduction allowed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Given these (poor) results, the EU equal pay policy could be assessed as a failure and its existence questioned. But, on the contrary, the EU equal pay policy seems unaffected by failure. Recently, the von der Leyen Commission has put equal pay at the heart of the Union of Equality programme and has proposed a Directive on pay transparency, which was adopted on 10 May 2023. My recent article “Can failure be useful in policy-making? The case of EU equal pay policy” explores this paradox: Why and how, despite repeated implementation failure, is the EU equal pay policy still up and running?
Continue readingBy Leah McCabe
Women’s movements often play a crucial role in highlighting the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG) and driving policy change, but what happens when feminists cannot agree on the most effective way forward? In my recent article published in Policy & Politics, I discuss how this very dilemma unfolded within the Scottish VAWG movement. While the movement has made significant gains in incorporating feminist concerns in domestic abuse/VAWG policy, making effective use of the new structures facilitated by devolution, it encountered difficulties in reaching a consensus on the definition of domestic abuse.
Specifically, my study revealed an enduring internal disagreement around the dominance of (single-axis) gendered frames. This policy framing conceptualises domestic abuse as a cause and consequence of gender inequality and patriarchal structures – a perspective subsequently integrated in national policy in 2000. However, organisations supporting Black and minority ethnic victims/survivors have argued that this conceptualisation of the problem oversimplifies the issue, failing to account for the complexity of violence. Instead, feminists from these organisations have advocated for intersectional frames which acknowledge the interlocking gendered, classed, and racialised dynamics of violence. Ultimately, these actors have not been granted similar access to policymaking processes, resulting in the marginalisation of their perspectives. Significantly, these internal debates have endured in the decades following devolution.
Continue readingby Sarah Brown, Senior Journal Manager
In our first highlights collection of 2024, we are delighted to feature three topical open access articles illuminating several different perspectives on feminist politics. All three emphasise the importance of considering intersectionality in politics and policymaking, which we’ve underlined in our previous spotlight features, for example with Professor Julia Jordan-Zachary and Dr Tiffany Manuel.
In the first article, Charlène Calderaro explores the racialisation of sexism, looking at how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in her case studies from Britain and France.
To introduce her research, Calderaro points out that, while gender-based violence is increasingly addressed through public policy, it also follows a process of ‘othering’ marked by racialisation in many European contexts. This racialisation process is particularly evident when examining the problem of gender-based violence in public spaces, for example, street harassment, where sexism is often attributed to migrant men or men from ethnic minorities. However, the extent of this racialisation process varies significantly across national contexts.
The findings show that the racialisation of sexism in policy-making against gender-based violence can be exacerbated by nationally embedded ideas on race and racism. It also suggests that, by extension, these different conceptions of race can affect the ability to prevent “femonationalism”, which refers to the increasing use of women’s rights to foster nationalism in the form of racial exclusion.
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