Women’s Participation & Leadership-Policy-By Amy Mazur
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: February 19, 2006
EGM/EPWD/2005/EP.5
27 February
2006
United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs
(DESA)
Division for the Advancement of Women
(DAW)
Economic Commission for Africa
(ECA)
Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU)
Expert Group Meeting on
Equal participation of women and men in
decision-making processes, with particular
emphasis on political participation and
leadership
24 to 27 October 2005
The Impact of Women’s Participation and
Leadership on Policy Outcomes:
A Focus on Women’s Policy
Machineries*
Prepared by:
Amy
Mazur
*
The views expressed in this
paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the
United Nations.
Introduction
“National machineries for
the advancement of women” or women’s policy agencies (WPAs) have been an
important part of the UN policy for women since its inception in the
1970s.[1]
Identified officially in 1975 at the first women’s conference in Mexico
and mentioned systematically at every women’s conference since, “. state-based
institutions charged formally with furthering women’s status and gender equality
(RNGS 2004)” have figured prominently in the official policy directives,
statements and reports from the UN on women’s status. The UN’s WPAs — the Commission on the
Status of Women and the Division of the Advancement of Women – are important
administrative actors in the elaboration of the UN women’s policies on women;
the UN emphasizes the importance of “national policy machineries “ in the
implementation of UN-backed principles of gender equality at the national level,
through “gender mainstreaming” in national level policies; and has called for
WPAs to promote “…the active involvement
of the broad and diverse range of institution actors in the public,
private and voluntary sectors to
work for equality between men and women (Beijing Platform of Action cited in Rai
2003b: 2)”. From this complex
and multi-level process, WPAs have received a great deal of attention from both
state and society based advocates for women’s rights and gender equality at
international, national and local levels.
A wealth of relatively recent research,
in part commissioned by the UN, (e.g. Rai 2003a), maps, assesses and explains
the role of WPAs in promoting gender equality.[2] The scholarly turn toward understanding the activities
of women’s policy offices has coincided with their growth (by the mid 1980s the
UN had identified 127 member states with WPAs) and with the increasing feminist
interest, both scholarly and political, in the state as a potential site for
social change and gender equality
The goal of this paper is
to focus on the role of WPAs in enhancing women’s political participation with a
particular emphasis on their influence on women’s participation and leadership
in policy outcomes. Using the feminist scholarship on gender and politics, the
presentation first discusses how women’s policy machineries can improve women’s
representation and participation on a conceptual level. The second section presents the results
of one systematic cross-national study, the RNGS (Research Network on Gender
Politics and the State) project, that specifically examines the question of
whether women’s policy agencies actually do promote women’s representation and
participation in western post industrial democracies. The paper ends with some concrete
policy recommendations about how to enhance women’s representation and
participation through WPAs suggested by the RNGS study.
Women’s Policies Agencies and Women’s Participation
and Representation
Work on gender and the
state asserts that these state agencies for women and gender equality can
represent women and women’s interests. As Weldon (2002a) argues in her
study of sexual violence policy in 36 countries, social movements and
institutions like WPAs are able to represent societal groups in the same way as
elected officials.
It is important to note
that the term women’s policy agency
or machinery has come to mean any
state-based agency, at all levels of government – national, sub-national or
local — or in any type of organ – elected, appointed, administrative, or
judicial— that seeks to promote the advancement of women and gender
equality. In countries where
political parties have a central role in government, in single party states or
parliamentary democracies for example, quasi WPAs (QUAWPAs) act partially
outside of the state parameters in the same manner as WPAs.[3] Thus, these agencies not only have the potential to
speak for women as a group as it is cross-cut by race, ethnicity, class,
geographic location,etc., but also for anyone, group or individual, man or
woman, seeking to advance women’s rights and strike down gender-based
hierarchies that contribute to inequalities between men and women.
Experts agree that the
shift from women to gender in the focus of most WPAs throughout the world
occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Staudt 2003 and Rai 2003b). Today, the names of many WPAs do not
even include the word woman, as in the cases of Scandinavian countries which
focus on gender equality. A new form of intersectional agency, first introduced
in the USA in the mid 1960s, where different forms of discrimination are dealt
with under one rubric, the so-called “one-stop-shops” (Lovenduski 2005a), have
become more common in Western Europe since the adoption of a new EU directive on
discrimination.
WPAs have the potential to
be major conduits for women’s descriptive and substantive
representation[4] and participation in three ways:
1
They may represent women
substantively through bringing women’s interests and gender equality issues into
public policy discussion, formulation and implementation, often through gender
mainstreaming.
2
They can represent women
descriptively and procedurally through helping the actors that speak for women
and gender equality to enter government policy-making
arenas.
3
Through the fact that women tend to
work in and lead these agencies, although not in all case, WPAs can increase the
participation of women in the state.[5]
Through facilitating
women’s representation, WPAs have the potential to contribute to the process of
democratization. whether the country be undergoing transitions to democracy,
struggling to maintain a stable democracy, or looking to make a stable democracy
more democratic.
As Honculada and Ofreneo
(2003: 142) observe in their study of WPAs in the Philippines, women’s
machineries can produce “… an expanded sisterhood with women in
government staking out claims as
much for themselves as for the whole bureaucracy, networking among each other
and with women in the GO-NGO community for mutual growth and … a common
agenda.” Femocrats, the individuals
–usually women, but sometimes men — who work for WPAs are important agents of
women’s representation in the policy formation process.[6] As Vargas
and Weiringa (1998) first articulated in a discussion of women’s movement and
public policy in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, femocrats in WPAs have
the potential to form a “triangle of empowerment” with women in elected and
appointed office and women’s groups that can improve women’s substantive
representation through the formulation and implementation of effective “feminist
policies” and women’s descriptive representation through bringing more women
into the process.[7]
Halsaa’s (1991 and 1998)
work on Norway also shows that “strategic partnerships” between women in parliament, women’s
groups and WPAs are crucial in developing successful feminist policy. Weldon’s
cross-national study of domestic violence policy also uses the notion of a
triangle of empowerment (2002b) and these triangles are also identified as
important variables in enhancing women’s participation and representation in
Mazur’s (2002) study of feminist policy formation in western post industrial
democracies. It is important to
note that the women’s group/movement part of the triangle can involve a wide
variety of actors from civil society, both individual groups, including women’s
groups and associations, autonomous women’s movements, women’s associations in
non gender specific groups like trade unions or political parties, and
experts.[8] These
women’s movement actors, as Weldon (2002) points out, should also be seen as
agents of women’s representation.
WPAs and femocrats play an
ever-increasing role in gender mainstreaming by both helping to implement a
mainstreaming approach to gender equality and in training and educating other
government actors about the complexities of gender-based disparities and the
necessarily transversal response to it. As studies of mainstreaming in the
EU have shown (e.g., Woodward 2003),
without an activist and knowledgeable WPA, informed by gender experts,
government can easily circumvent the original intent of gender mainstreaming,
which is to insert gender considerations in all areas of public policy to better
address gender-based inequities.
Staudt (2003) particularly emphasizes the need for femocrat experts to
train bureaucrats outside of WPAs in implementing gender mainstreaming and
through gender audits in budgeting.
The French gender audit, for example, was instituted and has been since
overseen by femocrats in the women’s rights service (Mazur 2005). This education and training role of WPAs
and their staff needs to occur in any explicitly feminist policy, whether it be
mainstreaming or not.
Femocrats also play crucial
roles in reaching out to “male allies” who are not aware of the intricacies of
the policy issue but may have the political will to push for a given policy
(e.g., Eisenstein 1996). They have been shown to be pivotal in convincing and
cajoling recalcitrant decision-makers as well. Valiente’s studies of the Women’s
Institute in Spain, for example, have pointed to the important “power of
persuasion” of the major national –level WPA (1995).
Creating agencies that are accountable to
groups, yet have enough autonomy within the political administrative system is
also seen as an important ingredient for achieving effective gender
mainstreaming (Rai 2003d and Staudt 2003).
Femocrats, gender experts and women’s groups often work together to
educate policy makers about the complexities of gender-based inequities, their
variegated solutions, and how gender mainstreaming can be adopted and
implemented. It is in this manner
that gender mainstreaming can actually be seen as a means of enhancing women’s
representation and participation.
As such, like WPAs, mainstreaming efforts have the potential to
contribute to processes of democratization in all corners of the globe.
Assessing State Feminism: The RNGS Study and
Results
Having conceptually mapped
out the different ways in which WPAs have the potential to enhance women’s
descriptive and substantive representation, it is important to now consider how
these diverse government structures have actually realized their promise and the
conditions for a positive outcome for women’s participation. This is a formidable task given the
variety of WPAs throughout the world in a broad range of cultural, political,
and social settings and at all levels of government. To name a few forms of
WPAs, Ministries, ministerial
correspondents; government study groups, National Level Institutes, Delegations,
Advisory Commissions,
administrative agencies,
enforcement agencies, parliamentary commissions, government-run
information centers, equality
councilors in police agencies and chargées de mission in city governments. There are many case studies of
national-level WPAs (e.g., Valiente 1995,
Kardam and Acuner 2003; Ugalde 2003; Honculada and Ofreneo 2003; Kwesiga
2003 and Rai 2003c , a few at the sub-national level (e.g., Ortbals 2005),
national cases studies that are placed within a global perspective (e.g.,
Lycklama,Vargas,
and Wieringa 1998 and Rai 2003a) a few
cross national comparisons in two or more countries (Goertz 2003; Sawer 1996), studies of
WPAs in a given region of the world (e.g. Jezerska, 2003;Stetson and Mazur 1995;
Stetson 2001; Mazur 2001; Outshoorn 2004; Lovenduski 2005; Haussman and Sauer
forthcoming) and examinations of WPAs at the transnational level (e.g., Zwingel
2005 and True and Mintrom 2001) .
To date, there has been no research that systematically studies whether WPAs make
a difference in women’s representation in all regions of the world. Many would argue that such an effort
would be too daunting in the absence of basic case studies of WPAs at all levels
of government in most countries. At
this point, it makes sense to take a mid range approach by examining activities
of WPAs in different regions of the world where countries have similar social
and political contexts, identifying trends in each region and then developing
systematic propositions for a more global perspective. As Rai (2003c) indicates, contexts
matter a great deal in the effective performance of WPAs.
The RNGS study takes such
an approach, examining the questions of women’s representation and WPAs in
western post industrial democracies.
Rather than assuming that WPAs represent women, the study asks whether
WPAs have acted, since 1970, in alliance with women’s movement activists, to
enhance women’s representation.
Founded in 1995, the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State
(RNGS) is composed of 43 members and 95 associates. RNGS designed and is currently
completing the large-scale comparative research project that examines if, how,
and why women’s policy offices, through their relations with women’s movements,
make post industrial democracies more democratic and the state more
feminist. Fifteen country
teams–USA, Canada, Italy, the UK, Ireland Germany, the Netherlands, Spain,
Austria, Belgium, Sweden, France, Finland, and Australia– have been collecting
data for this project since 1997.[9]
To assess the significance
of the activities of the agencies in policy debates, the study examines
hypotheses explaining whether or not their involvement was necessary for women’s
movement activists to be successful in achieving their procedural and
substantive goals. This interface
between the movements and agencies is explored in 132 policy debates on five key
issues: job training, abortion, prostitution, political representation, and a
top priority issue specific to each country concerned. Research results appear
in five edited volumes, one for each issue area (Stetson 2001; Mazur 2001;
Outshoorn 2004; Lovenduski 2005; Haussman and Sauer forthcoming) and plans are
underway for specific qualitative and quantitative analyses across the
issues.[10]
The findings presented here
are based on the qualitative studies published in the five books. The findings presented in this paper
must be seen as quite preliminary,
because systematic analyses of both the qualitative and quantitative data across
all five issue areas and all seventeen countries are still underway.
While the goal of the RNGS
project was to study three policy debates for each issue in each country, we
were not able to gather information on all issues in all of the countries. After selecting the debates using common
criteria, researchers were asked to describe how the debate around the policy
proposals unfolded, to locate the actors involved and to outline the frame of
the debate. They classified
the debate in terms of the major analytical question of the
study:
To what extent and under what
circumstances do different kinds of women’s policy offices provide necessary and
effective linkages for women’s movements in achieving substantive and procedural
responses from the state?
The model
developed by RNGS to answer this question names state responses to movement
activist’ demands in policy debates as the dependent variable, characteristics
of women’s movement actors and the policy environments as the independent
variables and the degree of effectiveness of women’s policy offices on specific
policy debates in relation to their institutional capacities as the intervening
variables.
There are four categories
of classification for the state responses to women’s movement actors, the
dependent variable. Dual response is where the state both
accepts individual women, groups, and/or constituencies representing gender
interests into the process and changes policy to coincide with feminist goals;
Cooptation is when the state accepts the individual women, groups, and/or
constituencies into the process but does not give policy satisfaction;
Preemption is when the state gives policy satisfaction, but does not
allow women, as individuals, groups or constituencies into the process; No
response is where the state has no procedural or substantive response to
movement demands.
The intervening variable measures WPA Activities that is,
the role and effect of women’s policy agencies as potential allies of the
women’s movement within the state in each policy debate. Are these agencies representatives of
women’s movements inside the state?
Or are these agencies examples of the state’s efforts to control or ‘deal
with’ the movement without changing process or policy? Do agencies affect changes in state
operations and policies to integrate women’s movement activists and goals? This produces four categories for
measuring the WPA effectiveness in representing women’s movement claims.
Insider — the WPA
incorporates women’s movement goals into its own positions on the policy issue
and is successful in gendering, that is, inserting these gendered policy
definitions into the dominant frame of the public debate on the issue;
Marginal—the WPA asserts movement goals, but is not successful in
gendering the policy debate;
Non-feminist—the WPA is not an advocate for movement goals but genders or
degenders policy debates in some other ways; and Symbolic—the WPA is
neither an advocate for movement goals in the policy process nor does it gender
policy definitions on the issue.
The following alliances between women’s movements and
WPAs are produced when these two dimensions are combined. Table 1 below
summarizes the RNGS results in terms of these alliances across the five issue
areas.
Successful Alliance (Insider/Dual Response) This type of alliance occurs
when WPAs present women’s movement goals and gender the debate and the women’s
movement actors participate and were able to achieve policy satisfaction; in
other words, WPAs fully enhanced women’s substantive and descriptive
representation.
Partially Successful Alliance
(Insider/ Cooptation or Preemption)
Here the WPA brings gender into the frame of the debate and supports
women’s movement demands, but there are either no women’s movement actors in the
debate or the women’s movement does not achieve any policy success.
Failure (Symbolic/No response) The WPA neither genders the
debate nor supports women’s movement positions in the debates. Women’s movement
actors are absent from the debate arena and the policy response fails to contain
women’s movement demands.
Unsuccessful Alliance (Marginal/No Response) WPAs do support women’s movement
actor positions in these alliances, but they are unable to gender the debate and
women’s movement actors have neither presence nor policy success.
No Alliances (some success)—(Symbolic/Dual Response, Cooptation, Pre-emption) Here, the women’s movement actors
achieve full or partial success without an active
WPA.
Ineffective/Unwilling WPAs—(Marginal, Non Feminist/No response) WPAs either do not
support women’s positions in the debate or gender the debate and the women’s
movement movements fail to participate or achieve policy success.
TABLE 1: WPA’s Impact on Women’s Substantive and
Descriptive Representation by Issue Area and Types of
Alliances
Issue Area |
Successful Alliances |
Partially Successful Alliances |
Failures |
Symbolic/ Dual |
Symbolic/ Cooptation |
Symbolic/ Preemption |
Ineffective |
Abortion 33 debates |
33% |
0% |
9%
|
18% |
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