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In this chapter, we explore gender equity issues in relation to the governance of sport in Wales. Our focus is primarily on Sport Wales (SW), the national agency responsible for developing and promoting sport and physical activity in Wales and for distributing National Lottery and Welsh Government funding. As a public authority, SW has a statutory responsibility to promote equality and eliminate direct and indirect discrimination. Their recent policy commitments express a desire to advance equality and promote inclusion and diversity within sports organisations in Wales. They also set the agenda for National Governing Bodies (NGBs) in Wales, in terms of providing a policy framework for understanding and pursuing gender equity in sport and sport governance. In this chapter, we present a snapshot of the governance and leadership policy landscape for Welsh sport, with a specific focus on gender equity. We present data collected from publicly available online policy documents relating to SW, and their NGB partners, relevant to gender equity provision. Based on the data, we suggest that there is evidence of progress in terms of the numbers of women on boards in Wales as well as the creation of gender equity policies within NGBs in Wales. We argue, however, that progress is inconsistent across the different NGBs in Wales, and it is less clear whether sport governing bodies can implement policies to effectively challenge organisational culture and ethos. We concluded by suggesting future Wales specific research priorities on this topic.

There has been an explosion of interest in “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” (EDI) – also referred to as DEI among other acronyms. On the one hand, this management trend has the potential to draw attention to the ways in which organizational practices and climates can be transformed to have a positive impact on the underrepresentation of women and other marginalized and excluded groups in the workplace. On the other hand, there may be real consequences for women as EDI replaces other concepts such as women's rights, gender equality, affirmative action, employment equity, gender discrimination, etc. This chapter applies a gender lens to the EDI concept and management policy and practice. It juxtaposes EDI's emergence with the lack of progress on gender equality that is observed and measured in many regions of the world and highlights several critiques that may explain this lack of progress. It also identifies what EDI policies and practices need to take into consideration to better address gender inequality in the workplace. Legal approaches are discussed along with a list of potential areas of research on EDI and gender equality to determine the best path forward for making concrete progress on true equality for women in the workplace.

Over the past 20 years, the European Union has developed a comprehensive policy on gender equality (GE) in the fields of research, innovation and higher education. While North European countries have actively implemented policies in this direction, South and East European countries have been far less active and made limited progress, resulting in widening policy gaps across countries. Drawing from the experience of a capacity-building project (TARGET), this chapter explores the factors that impede the implementation of gender equality plans (GEPs) in research and higher education institutions across five countries – Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Italy and Serbia. It argues that the lack of a coherent GE discourse in research and innovation policies that sheds light on structural barriers and implicit bias is a central impediment: it severely limits the potential of GEPs and the power of change agents in research and higher education organisations in Southeast Europe to stimulate institutional change.

In this chapter, we critically interrogate Pakistani Higher Education Commission (HEC)'s “Policy Guidelines against Sexual Harassment in Institutions of Higher Learning” (HEC, 2011, 2020) to reveal that the policy represents a form of rhetorical genderwashing, rather than a concerted attempt to effect structural change (Fox-Kirk et al., 2020). Through this critical interrogation, we introduce a new methodological approach to investigate genderwashing, that of collaborative feminist policy analysis. This chapter is based on the theoretical framework of Sara Ahmed's concept of “institutional nonperformativity” (2012). Pakistan recognized workplace harassment as a legal issue for the first time in the 2010 Sexual Harassment Act (Jabbar & Imran, 2013). The Act, and subsequent policies, was an attempt to practice equity and fairness in sexual harassment cases. Our investigation revealed that the policy reinforces gender power inequality, gendered language, and is an example of institutional silence, and genderwashing in the workplace (Fox-Kirk et al., 2020).

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to consider “equality mainstreaming” as an international policy and to explore some of the implications this raises for public management.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The methodology is based on literature review looking at the way gender mainstreaming practices have developed a wider application to equality mainstreaming. Examining the relationship between mainstreaming and evidence-based management, it comments on the challenges this poses for public management.

Findings – Equality mainstreaming and its implications have been largely absent from public management discourse despite the growth of equality mainstreaming in international policy.

Research limitations/Implications – Research in public management should address mainstreaming and its potential for social change.

Practical implications – This chapter brings this issue to the forefront in an effort to engage academics and public managers.

Social implications – This chapter raises theoretical questions about mainstreaming and social change in favor of equality. It is a starting point for further research on public management as a tool for shifting organizational and societal values.

Originality/Value – The chapter provides an overview of previous literature and policy development in this area and then moves on to explore the implications of extending mainstreaming as a concept to other policy areas and examines both challenges and opportunities raised by this approach for the management of values in public services.

To investigate the association between country-level differences in childcare enrollment, the presence of affirmative action policy, and female parliamentary representation and individual-level conflict between work and family.

This study applies data from the 2002 International Social Survey Program (n = 14,000 + ) for respondents in 29 countries and pairs them with macro-level measures of childcare enrollment, the presence of affirmative action policy, and female parliamentary representation. I estimate the model using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM 7) and also assess cross-level interactions by gender and parental status.

The models show that female parliamentary representation has a robust negative association with individual-level reports of work–family and family–work conflict. These associations do not vary by gender or parental status. Also, mothers report less family–work conflict in countries with more expansive childcare enrollment, indicating that this welfare policy benefits the intended group.

This research implies that greater female parliamentary representation has widespread benefits to all citizens’, rather than just women’s or mothers’, work–family and family–work conflict. Additional longitudinal research would benefit this area of study.

This research suggests that increasing female parliamentary representation at the country-level may promote work–life balance at the individual-level. It also indicates that public childcare enrollment benefits women through lower family–work conflict which may encourage continuous maternal labor force participation and reduce economic gender inequality.

This chapter builds on an emerging area of work–family research applying multilevel modeling to draw empirical links between individual work–family experiences and macro-level structural variation.

This chapter considers the commitment of gender equality at universities and how it is expressed and measured via a gender equality scorecard. The Gender Equality Scorecard is seen as an accountability measure that seeks to build awareness of the magnitude of the problem (if it exists), interpret the meaning of the (in)equities, and move to action. It is regarded as a supportive mechanism to the development and implementation of a Gender Policy as articulated in The UWI Strategic Plan, 2012–2017. The development of a Scorecard is also seen as an example of collaborative governance in action that fosters engagement, commitment, and action across an institution. The proposed model draws upon the experiences of the Gender Equity Scorecards used by international development agencies and other higher educational institutions. The chapter proposes a framework and methodology using staff and student data from The University of the West Indies for the period 1990–1991 to 2011–2012 to build a Gender Scorecard. Finally, the Scorecard is seen as a tool to track performance related to the creation and enhancement of relevant structures and processes to institutionalize gender equality into the functions, operations, and governance of institutions.

Despite the absence of federal legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression, many companies have adopted such policies in recent years. We examine the impact of several contextual factors thought to influence gender identity and expression nondiscrimination policy adoption among Fortune 500 firms from 1997 to 2007. Our findings suggest that city and state laws likely influence policy adoption, as do federal case rulings regarding gender nonconformity and the adoption of similar policies by companies in the same industry. We found little evidence that companies respond to state or city executive orders or to media coverage of gender identity issues in the workplace.

The spread of corporate board quota legislation is studied in light of diffusion theory. Mechanisms of diffusion, path dependency and critical junctures can contribute to explaining the spread of policy reforms, such as the corporate board quota legislation. The empirical section describes the Norwegian reform process and maps out the ongoing European and global reform processes and debates. Seven countries, in addition to Norway, have in recent years initiated legal reforms and adopted corporate board quota rules: Spain, Iceland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Malaysia. However, the debates over the introduction of parallel legislation extend further, and are a burning issue in several other Western European countries, as well as globally. The discussion addresses why this policy spreads, and tries to understand the complexities of factors that have led to the diffusion of public debate and legal reform of corporate board quota.

The TARGET approach aims at establishing a reflexive gender equality policy in research performing and research funding organisations. Monitoring has enormous potential to support reflexivity at both the institutional and the individual levels in the gender equality plan (GEP) development and implementation context. To exploit this potential, the monitoring system has to consist of meaningful indicators, which adequately represent the complex construct of gender equality and refer to the concrete objectives and policies of the GEP. To achieve this, we propose an approach to indicator development that refers to a theory of change for the GEP and its policies. Indicator development thus becomes a reflexive endeavour and monitoring a living tool. This requires constant reflection on data gaps, validity of indicators and the further development of indicators. Furthermore, we recommend the creation of space for reflexivity to discuss monitoring results with the community of practice.