Search results

This chapter presents the findings of a Gender and Leadership study on promoting gender responsiveness and equality in Ghanaian Colleges of Education (CoEs) conducted in 2017. Specifically, this chapter explores CoEs actors’ perspectives on and experiences with using predetermined gender-responsive scorecard (GRS) as a strategy for promoting gender equality within the CoEs. Multiple-case study involving 10 CoEs selected purposively was used to explore the GRS implementation. Data collection and analysis methods included semi-structured interviews and “processual” analysis. The findings revealed a general contradiction among respondents regarding which gender actions/strategies had been implemented in the case study CoEs. Nonetheless, amid reported implementation challenges, there was general acknowledgment of the importance of the GRS in running gender-responsive CoEs in Ghana. The study concludes that the effective use and implementation of the GRS strategies appear imperative in promoting female success in CoEs, not only in Ghana but also in contexts where gender gap is an issue in teacher education.

In Sweden, gender mainstreaming policies have a long political history. As part of the national gender equality strategy of the Swedish forest industry, the ten largest forestry companies committed themselves to gender mainstream their policies. Limiting the impact of policies and the agency of change, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the varied and conflicting meanings and constitution of the concepts, the problem and, in extent, the organisational realities of gender mainstreaming.

In both, implementation and practice, gender mainstreaming posse challenges on various levels and by analysing these documents as practical texts from the WPR-approach. This paper explores constructions of gender and gender equality and their implications on the practice and the political of gender mainstreaming in a male-dominated primary industry.

The results show that the organisations themselves were not constituted as the subject of the policy but instead some of the individuals (women). The subject position of women represented in company policy was one of lacking skills and competences and in the need of help. Not only men and the masculine norms but organisational processes and structures were also generally invisible in the material. Power and conflict were mainly absent from the understanding of gender equality. Instead, consenting ideas of gender equality were the focus. Such conceptualisations of gender equality are beneficial for all risk concealing power structures and thereby limit the political space for change.

By highlighting the scale of policy and the significance of organisational contexts, the results indicate how gender and gender equality are constitutive through the governing technologies of neoliberal and market-oriented ideologies in policy – emphasising the further limiting of space for structural change and politicalization within the male-dominated organisations of Swedish forest industry.

Previous studies show that the implementation of gender equality encounters resistance in military organizations, but it is often invisible or seen as confined to anonymous structures or troubled individuals. This paper aims to show how the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) use organizational principles to resist implementing gender equality measures.

The study is a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies in the SAF’s 2013–2018 annual reports to government.

The organizing principles of instrumentality and distance, while existing in parallel with gender equality efforts, actually pursue logics that prevents the SAF from implementing gender equality. The principle of instrumentality in this context means that gender equality in the SAF is of secondary interest to organizational members. The principle of distancing from the problem includes strategies that alienate female from male officers.

The contribution of this paper is the finding that the use of organizing principles represents conscious organizational resistance to gender equality efforts. This kind of use needs to be revealed and criticized to change military organizations.

Governments have demonstrated a renewed interest in progressing gender equality for their workforces, including in Australia. This refocusing has resulted in a tranche of new gender equality policies being introduced into the Australian Public Service (APS). The purpose of this paper is to examine how New Public Management (NPM) is reflected in these gender equality policies and consider whether NPM may assist or hinder gender being “undone” or “redone” in APS organisations.

A content analysis was conducted to assess the strategies contained within the gender equality policies of all 18 Australian government departments.

The content analysis reveals that the policies strongly reflect an NPM framing, except in one important area – that of monitoring and evaluation. The lack of attention to this crucial element of NPM may hinder effective implementation of many of the policies. The authors also conclude that while good intent is evident in the policies, they may “redo” rather than “undo” gender in organisations.

The paper will assist organisations which are developing and implementing gender equality policies. Even though NPM is specific to the public sector, the research highlights the potential and pitfalls when developing such policies in an environment focused on increasing efficiencies and reducing costs.

While gender equality and public sector reforms occurred simultaneously in Australia, few researchers have examined the interactions between the two.

In this paper the authors aim to examine the forms in which feminist activism is played out at contemporary managerial universities and pose the following question: what notions of feminist activism and feminist theory have to be revisited in order to sustain the target of gender equality and support its move further into the centre and the mainstream of managerial universities?

Based on action research the authors document a workshop which they organised for different constituencies (administrators, researchers and feminist activists) working towards gender equality at an Austrian university and discuss its results in the context of feminist theory.

The five voices collected at the workshop show that feminist theories are still the underlying guiding principles for feminist activism towards gender equality at managerial universities. As this is the first time that different generations of feminist activists have been present at managerial universities and are working in a top‐down environment supported by administrators responsible for gender equality, common practices that have been successful to implement gender equality in the past have to be refined and new spaces for collaboration established.

This is the first paper that explores the multiple voices amongst those engaged in the process of transformation towards gender equality at contemporary managerial universities. It shows that an open discussion of complementary and conflicting ways in which the representatives can construct their selves, their strategies and their actions is required in order to start “managing the management” anew – from a higher level than the feminist grassroots activists in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sweden, as a country based on extremely high secular and self-expression values, serve as an example that somewhat differ from other countries internationally, when it comes to educational leadership curriculum. The chapter takes its starting point at the governmental decision for Swedish universities to gender-mainstream their organisations, something that affects the educational leadership curriculum. To be able to discuss this, I present three research studies on gendering leader identity development processes and gender equality strategies in the Swedish higher education setting. In a longitudinal study of the process of leader identity development, the main result was the emergence of a gendering process in the discourse on academic leadership. At the end of the leadership assignment period, leader identity was described in differing terms at subject positions held by women and men, respectively. In a separate study on female heads of research-heavy departments, three conflicting subject positions appeared that showed different strategies when leaders were of the female sex: (a) a gender-conscious position, (b) a gender-neutral or gender-unconscious position and (c) a position of sex discrimination experience. In a third, large national study, based on horizontal analysis of gender equality in Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs), was found that universities internally consist of different worlds when it comes to the possibility of making academic careers and in how male- and female-dominated academic disciplines explain gender inequality and strategies to handle this. Results from these studies will be discussed, in light of the striving for (gender) equal and just organisations, since gender equality is an important aspect of Swedish educational leadership curriculum.

An increasing number of countries have introduced duties for public-sector organisations who, in addition to addressing discrimination, are now also required to promote equality of opportunity between different groups. The purpose of this paper is to explore the limited progress of gender equality policies, through a study of the local implementation of equalities policies. The authors highlight the role of equalities leads in the public sector as local “agents of change”, and explore explanations of the implementation gap between policy and practice.

The paper reports on a small-scale qualitative study with equalities leads in the health sector in England. The study comprised semi-structured interviews with equalities leads from nine health organisations which were purposively selected to include a mix of areas and populations. The interviews focused on the leads’ backgrounds and their perceptions of barriers to their work.

The equalities leads had a range of experience prior to their current post, though most had little formal subject-specific training. They highlighted a number of barriers to effective implementation of gender equality strategies, including resource issues, the impact of organisational change, the increased the number of equalities they were expected to address, organisational perceptions that gender was no longer a priority and resistance to what are seen as “tick box” exercises.

The value of this paper is that it adds to the understanding of the challenges facing the implementation of gender equalities policies in the health sector, the reasons for these and the role of local policy implementers in the effectiveness of national equalities policies.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment are considered core development objectives (SDG 5) and instrumental in achieving other SDGs such as economic growth and food security and improved health and education. Cocoa is seen as a ‘man’s crop’ and there is entrenched gender bias in its value chain. However, women play a crucial role in the tending and post-harvesting of cocoa which are key to the price paid. This chapter investigates, via a 20-year in-depth case study, the partnership between Fair Trade Social Enterprise Divine Chocolate Ltd and Kuapa Kokoo (KK) cocoa farmer’s cooperative in Ghana. The case takes an in-depth look at women’s role in the cocoa value chain and how their strategic interests, practical needs and power can be addressed.

The Divine–Kuapa Kooko partnership, which implemented a clear resourced gender equality strategy, has made a positive contribution to reducing inequality, empowering women cocoa farmers and improving their rights. Setting quotas for women’s representation at all levels of KK’s structure has improved the strategic interests of women cocoa farmers and transformed the political structures of the cooperative. Also setting gender equality as part of the KK’s constitution enhances the empowerment and power of women cocoa farmers. Providing equal access to training and resources also enhances the practical capabilities of women.

The chapter proposes a framework of how to achieve improvements in gender quality and women’s empowerment. This case will assist other organisations who have targeted Sustainable Development Goal 5 of gender equality and women’s empowerment as part of their strategy.

Gender competence as part of engineering education can better prepare men and women to work on sustainable solutions that benefit entire societies. This chapter describes the framework and lessons learned of a community of practice (CoP) for gender equality facilitated by the Mediterranean Engineering Schools Network. Faculty and students from Mediterranean European, North African and Middle Eastern countries came together in this CoP, which was supported by the TARGET project, to develop a practical plan using a reflexive approach. The transfer of knowledge between generations is achieved by using participatory learning processes, facilitating mindful awareness, widening experiences, deepening understandings and building a gender-sensitive mindset. Students embarked on the journey to become change agents. The process led to the consolidation of gender equality knowledge, competence building and the development of change agents for gender equality. This CoP can inspire other institutions to undertake a participatory path towards gender equality – at local, regional, or global level.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on top women managers who act as change agents in the machista culture of Mexico. Specifically, the authors centre the attention not only on the strategies performed by these change agents to reduce inequality, but also on understanding the way in which they discursively reproduce or challenge essentialist notions of gender with respect to the cultural and organizational context.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 top women managers in Mexico who are actively involved as change agents. A feminist poststructuralist methodological framework using critical discourse analysis was used to uncover competing notions of gender and related strategies developed to promote gender equality.

The analysis reveals that the 12 change agents perform strategies for inclusion, and only half of them engage in strategies for re-evaluation. The authors were unable to recognize whether these change agents are engaged in strategies of transformation. These change agents also reproduce and challenge “essentialist” notions of gender. In some instances – based on their own career experiences and gendered identities – they (un)consciously have adopted essentialism to fit into the cultural context of machista society. They also challenge the gender binary to eradicate essentialist notions of gender that created gender inequalities in the first place.

The experience of these 12 top women managers may not represent the voice of other women and their careers. Ultimately, intersections with class, organizational level, nationality, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation must be taken into account so to represent other women’s particular interests with respect to equality.

For those researchers-consultants who may be involved in an intervention strategy, it is important to focus on helping the change agents in reviewing and reflecting on their own “vision of gender equity”. During the strategic activities of mentoring and training, these change agents could potentially “leak” a particular “vision of gender” to other women and men. Thus, part of the intervention strategy should target the change agent’s self-reflection to influence her capacity to act as change agents.

The authors contribute to the literature on change agents and interventions for gender equality. Intervention strategies usually centre on essentialist notions of gender. The study offers potential explanations for this approach by paying attention to the process of how change agents, in their efforts to promote gender equality, may be unconsciously projecting their own identities onto others and/or consciously engaging in strategic essentialism to fit into the machista context of Mexico.