Showing papers on "Gender history published in 2005"

Playing It Straight: Uncovering Gender Discourse in the Early Childhood Classroom

Abstract: In particular, this book uses alternative theoretical perspectives to focus on how young children are 'doing' gender in kindergarten classroom. Rather than relying exclusively on biological and socialization theories of gender construction, Blaise breaks down theoretical barriers with new understandings of how gender is socially and politically constructed by young children.

The sociology of gender : an introduction to theory and research

Abstract: Introduction To The Sociology Of Gender:.Introduction.Sociological Vantage Points.A Brief History Of The Sociological Study Of Gender.What Is Gender?.A Working Definition Of Gender.Three Frameworks For Understanding Gender.Gender Matters.Who's To Blame: Understanding Gender Inequality.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.A Close Look."What's In A Name?" Harbour Fraser Hodder.Part I: Conceptual Approaches:.2. The Gendered Person:.Chapter Objectives.Sex And Gender.Sex And Sex Category.The Gendered Person.Gender As Traits, Abilities, Or Behavioral Dispositions.Sex Difference Research.Sex Differences And Gender Inequality.Becoming Gendered.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.Key Terms.A Closer Look."Evolution, Males, And Violence" David P. Barash."Ambiguous Genitalia And The Construction Of Gender" Suzanne J. Kessler."The Science And Politics Of Comparing Men And Women" Alice H. Eagly.3. The Gendered Person:.Chapter Objectives.Interactionist Views Of Gender.Gendered Organizations.Gendered Institutions.Toward A Multilayered Conception Of Gender.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.Key Terms.A Closer Look."If You Let Me Play:' Nike Ads And Gender" Robert Goldman And Stephen Papson."Resources For Doing Gender" Candace West And Don Zimmerman.Part II: Gender In Context:.4. Work And Family As Gendered Institutions:.Chapter Objectives.The Division Of Labor.Gender, Work, And Family In Historical Perspective.The Post-Industrial Era: Married Women's Rising Labor Force Participation.Portraits Of Family And Work.A Broader View: Gender And Social Organization.Work And Family Revisited.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.Key Terms.A Closer Look."Constructing Jobs As Women's Work In World War II" Ruth Milkman."Work-Family Arrangements In Four Countries" Laura Den Dulk.5. Gender, Childhood, And Family Life:.Chapter Objectives."Is It A Boy Or A Girl?" Gender Construction In Children.The Household Division Of Labor And The Family.Marriage, Families, And Their Consequences For Women And Men.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.Key Terms.A Closer Look."Raising Gender-Aschematic Children" Sandra Lipsitz Bem."The Meaning Of Motherhood In Black Culture" Patricia Hill Collins."The Wage Penalty For Motherhood" Michelle J. Budig And Paula England.6. Gendered Jobs And Gendered Workers:.Chapter Objectives.Explaining The Sex Segregation Of Jobs And Occupations.Gender-Typing Of Jobs, Occupations, And Hierarchies.The Wages Of Gender.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.Key Terms.A Closer Look."Women As Emotion Managers" Arlie Russell Hochschild."Hegemonic Masculinity In Female Occupations" Christine L. Williams.Part III: Epilogue:.7. Deconstructing Gender Differences And Inequalities:.Chapter Objectives.Gender Distinctions And Inequalities.The Reproduction Of Gender Inequality.Challenging Gender Inequality.Making Gender Matter Less.Chapter Summary.For Further Reading.Key Terms.A Closer Look."Privilege As Paradox" Allan G. Johnson."Gender Vertigo" Barbara J. Risman

Beards, Breasts, and Bodies Doing Sex in a Gendered World

Abstract: Gender is commonly thought of as dependent on sex even though there are occasional aberrations. Interviews with female-to-male trans people, however, suggest that sex and sex characteristics can be understood as expressions of gender. The expression of gender relies on both behavior and the appearance of the performer as male or female. When sex characteristics do not align with gender, behavior becomes more important to gender expression and interpretation. When sex characteristics become more congruent with gender, behavior becomes more fluid and less important in asserting gender. Respondents also challenge traditional notions of sexual orientation by focusing less on the sex of the partner and more on the gender organization of the relationship. The relationship’s ability to validate the interviewee’s masculinity or maleness often takes precedence over the sex of the partner, helping to explain changing sexual orientation as female-to-male transsexual and transgendered people transition into men.

Doing Gender in the Bedroom: Investing in Gender Norms and the Sexual Experience:

Abstract: People often believe that they must be consistent with gender norms to obtain others' approval. The authors believe people who invest in gender norms tend to base self-esteem on others' approval, which undermines their sexual autonomy and ultimately diminishes their sexual satisfaction in intimate relationships. A survey of 309 sexually active college students examined whether placing importance on conforming to gender norms undermines sexual relationships because of its link to basing self-worth on others' approval and decreased sexual autonomy. Using structural equation modeling, the authors found that valuing gender conformity (but not avoiding gender deviance) negatively affects sexual pleasure for both men and women through increased contingency on others' approval and restricted sexual autonomy. The model fit the data for both men and women.

Introduction: Comparative gender mainstreaming in a global era

Abstract: This article analyses gender mainstreaming as a new and essentially contested form of feminist politics and policy. The article addresses the different forms that gender mainstreaming takes, in different countries and different policy domains, in order to push forward the theoretical debates. Gender mainstreaming often draws on transnational processes, involving transnational networks and agencies and transformations of the discourse of universal human rights, challenging the traditional focus on national processes. These developments are facilitated by the rise of global processes and institutions, such as the UN. Tensions can arise as a result of actors seeking to mainstream quite different models of gender equality: based on equality through sameness; through equal valuation of difference; and through transformation. The intersection of gender with other complex forms of inequality has challenging implications for a primary focus on gender within gender mainstreaming. Nevertheless, certain for...

Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History

Abstract: ��� For many years after the completion of Manful Assertions with John Tosh in 1991, and my book on the British organization man in 1994, I was stuck for an answer when people asked me if I was still working on masculinity. For a while I stopped reading gender history, and I immersed myself in readings, courses, and seminars on psychoanalytic methods and on the history of psychoanalysis. I had, via the study of the history of gender, become interested in the history of subjectivity: in the emotional experiences of men as public actors, in the qualities and character of their relationships with others, and in the place of unconscious motivations in social action. I was no longer sure if the term ‘masculinity’ could encompass this interest, and until very recently, when I was called upon to write a commentary on the history of masculinity in twentieth-century Britain, I have tended not to use the term. This process of re-engaging with recent histories of masculinity has led me to revisit some influential conceptualizations of gender within cultural history, as a means of addressing the question of why it has been difficult to find a place for the study of subjectivity. This question is a complicated one, because some of the work that has helped to define the field, in fact promised a focus on the psychic determinants of gender. And yet the promise has remained largely that, a promise. A decade and a half ago John Tosh and I wrote in Manful Assertions that the concept of masculinity was a complex one because it was ‘the product both of lived experienced and fantasy’, and that further studies were needed to ‘explore how cultural representations become part of subjective identity’. 1 We indicated the need for approaches that explored points of connection between the social and the psychic. Four years later, in Men in Perspective, Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell commented on the difficulty that both social and cultural approaches tended to conceive of masculinity only in terms of external codes and structures. The processes through which men came to identify with such codes were largely assumed. 2 In Masculinities, also published in 1995, Bob Connell warned that a ‘purely normative definition gives no grip on masculinity at the level of personality’. 3 The problem identified a decade and a half ago, and reiterated a decade ago as the field consolidated, remains just as true today. Masculinity is still viewed, by and large, more as a matter of social or cultural construction than as an aspect of personality. An edited volume just published,

Gender Differences in the Academic Ethic and Academic Achievement

Abstract: This paper investigates gender differences in the academic ethic and academic achievement among college students. We used survey data collected from students at a medium-size state university in the Southeast. Results of our analysis indicate that women are more likely to possess an academic ethic than men and that women also tend to have higher GPAs. Furthermore, regression analysis with GPA as the dependent variable revealed differences between men and women in terms of significant predictors. For women, active participation in student clubs or groups was positively associated with GPA. For men, employment was negatively related with GPA. We used Coleman's (1988) concept of social capital, Chodorow's (1978) psychoanalytic feminist theory, and Gilligan's (1982) theory of women's development in an attempt to build a potential theoretical explanation for these findings and to guide future research. ********** Gender differences in education persist in the United States even after several decades of intense scrutiny and policy change (Nowell and Hedges 1998; Ballantine 2001). Education is like a dual-edged sword. It has been a source of advancement, empowerment, and liberation for women, but it has also reproduced gender inequalities. Our understanding of gender differences and inequality has benefitted from the development of gender theories in the social sciences (Chafetz 1999), but educational theory and research that emphasize gender differences have received relatively limited attention (Jacobs 1996:154). There is little doubt that education serves as a key for understanding gender issues in part because it largely mirrors social relationships in society (Persell, et al. 1999:407). For example, by examining gender in higher education we learn that one's gender is related to one's educational attainment, which in turn is highly related to income. Nevertheless, scholars have not paid sufficient attention to gender issues in higher education (Jacobs 1996). Regarding gender differences in academic achievement, in particular, most of the attention has been at the elementary and secondary levels (Nowell and Hedges 1998; Hallinan 2000). This paper therefore attempts to extend the current literature by shedding light on gender differences in academic achievement among college students. Women and men are known to differ in their college experiences and face different outcomes (Jacobs 1996). One study suggests that female college students are almost as likely to cheat as their male counterparts even though the former's ethical standards tend to be higher than those of the latter (Whitley, et al. 1999). Results from another study indicate that men are more likely to be either disengaged or highly engaged in constructive educational activities while women are more likely to fall in between these extremes into a more typical group (Hu and Kuh 2002). Gender also seems to influence what type of student groups one affiliates with. Women are more likely to be labeled as a "grind" whereas men are much more likely to be labeled as a "recreator" (Kuh, Hu, and Vesper 2000). Grinds exhibit a high level of academic effort and recreators are involved with sports and exercise. Students labeled as grinds exhibited attitudes and behaviors very similar to those who have been identified as possessing an academic ethic (see Rau and Durand 2000; Smith and Pino 2003). In light of these findings, it is perhaps not surprising that women were found to be as academically successful as men, but what is intriguing is the fact that the former receive fewer rewards for their academic achievement later in life (Mickelson 1989). Minority and working-class students do not achieve as much as women partly because they do not anticipate higher returns from a college education, but women do even though they also experience lower returns on their college education (Mickelson 1989). One potential explanation for why women experience lower returns on their college education lies in the role of female peer groups that may perpetuate the themes of romance and popularity (Holland and Eisenhart 1990). …

What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950

Abstract: I is now over ten years since John Tosh asked the question, “What should historians do with masculinity?” The history of masculinity was then emerging as, and has since become, a burgeoning field of enquiry, with close (although not always uncontested) links with women’s history, gender history, and the history of sexuality. This seemed a good point to take stock of the central themes and questions that have emerged. The articles in this special section survey the findings of historians of masculinity in Britain from the early sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries in order to assess what has been achieved and where the main gaps lie, where the field might be going, and what insights into the relationship between gender and change are yielded by a long-term chronological perspective. The articles that follow originate from a one-day colloquium, held at the University of Sussex in September 2003. Contributors with expertise in a range of different periods were invited, although it was intended that each contribution should overlap chronologically to aid the identification of key themes. Contributors were asked to reflect on four central questions. First, in what ways has masculinity (as both represented and experienced) been defined as a concept and deployed as an analytical category by historians? Second, what methodologies have been employed by historians of masculinity, and how have different approaches influenced

Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950

Abstract: T First World War continues to loom large in the historiography of twentieth-century masculinity, providing a further example of how gender studies have tended to work within, rather than to recast, established topics and chronologies. Debate has focused on trench warfare in particular, and how far it contributed to a reassessment of Edwardian concepts of manliness. The question of whether or not heroic ideals were buried in the mud of Flanders figures in histories of public schools and youth organizations; in literary studies of interwar imaginative writing; as well as in research directly inspired by gender history, on topics as diverse as men’s bodies, sexuality, and domesticity. Shell shock, and its effect on medical and military ideas of manliness, has been at the forefront of the discussion. Despite this relatively developed historiography, there is little agreement. During the 1980s, building on the work of authors such as Paul Fussell, who had argued that the chivalric language of the prewar was found hopelessly wanting in the trenches, scholars pointed to the impact of the war in the reassessment of heroic ideals. In a still-influential essay published in 1987, Elaine Showalter argued that shell shock was nothing less than “the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of ‘manliness’ itself.” Young subaltern officers, socialized through their public school education

Transformations : Women, Gender and Psychology

Abstract: Part 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Paving the Way Part 2 GENDER IN SOCIAL CONTEXT 2 Gender, Status, and Power 3 Images of Women 4 The Meanings of Difference Part 3 GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT 5 Sex, Gender and Bodies 6 Gendered Identities: Childhood And Adolescence Part 4 GENDERED LIFE PATHS 7 Sex, Love, and Romance 8 Commitments: Women and Close Relationships 9 Mothering 10 Work and Achievement 11 The Second Half: Midlife and Aging Part 5 GENDER AND WELL-BEING 12 Violence Against Women 13 Psychological Disorders, Therapy, and Women's Well-Being 14 Making a Difference: Toward a Better Future for Women

Gender equity in Commonwealth higher education

Abstract: This article explores emerging themes from the literature on gender and higher education in low-income Commonwealth countries. It attempts to engage with a range of unpublished or 'grey' literature and to identify aspects of gender inequality that universally disturb and discomfort. The dominant literature in the field of gender and higher education is from the UK, USA, Northern Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet there is considerable gender equity activity also in low-income Commonwealth countries. But the nature of gendered change or obstacles to gender equality in higher education have not been systematically mapped across the Commonwealth and there has been an absence of multilateral dissemination. The article highlights how gender has been excluded as a category of analysis in writing on the changing political economy of higher education and the development of borderless provision.

Butch Identity Development: The Formation of an Authentic Gender

Abstract: The present article explores the gender identity development of butch lesbian women, as conveyed in semi-structured interviews. A grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) analysis of the women’s ...

Political Constructions of Gender Equality: Travelling Towards … a Gender Balanced Society?

Abstract: The article discusses equal rights to equal participation and public policies for gender balance in different societal arenas. Although gender balance is a central aim of official Norwegian gender equality politics, male hegemony is the dominant feature in most institutional settings of leadership, power and influence. This inconsistency is rhetorically handled through travel metaphors of gender equality and utility arguments about women's contributions to public life. Gender equality then becomes a question of time, and of how society would profit from “more” gender equality. The rights perspective is distorted. In the final part of the article, we discuss alternative, normative, approaches: gender balance in relation to parity in participation, a distributive norm of simple equality, and principles of non‐discrimination.

Gender and achievement: what have exams got to do with it?

Abstract: This paper argues that examinations have a complex role in creating and defining gender differences in performance in public examinations. To illustrate this argument three aspects of examining are reviewed: styles of examinations and how they define achievement; coursework and the role it plays in contributing to gender differences in performance; and tiered entry systems in examinations and how they provide unequal opportunities for boys and girls to be successful. It presents the context in which research into gender, achievement and examining is now located by initially reviewing the recent media hype around gender and achievement. It then takes an historical look at gender and achievement and goes on to describe new gender stereotypes that influence current understandings of boys' and girls' achievement. There is much information that is ‘hidden’ behind examination results as they are commonly reported. This hidden information has more to do with how differences in performance are obtained, how subje...

On gender politics.

Abstract: Some people may be laughing when looking at you reading in your spare time. Some may be admired of you. And some may want be like you who have reading hobby. What about your own feel? Have you felt right? Reading is a need and a hobby at once. This condition is the on that will make you feel that you must read. If you know are looking for the book enPDFd gender politics as the choice of reading, you can find here.

Engendering Trauma Race, Class, and Gender Reaffirmation after Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract: Using extra familial child sexual abuse (CSA) as an example of family trauma, the author interviewed 60 parents of sexually abused boys on multiple occasions to analyze the organization of gender, race, and class in parental coping processes. Despite access to alternative interpretations of CSA that challenge conventional notions of gender, parents in this study typically rely on traditional themes to make meaning of the CSA experience. The author organized the data analytically around gender strategies and found that parents used race- and class-specific gender strategies in the aftermath of trauma. Most important, mother-blame is theorized as a form of gender reaffirmation. The author uses the term gender reaffirmation to illustrate the way social actors recuperate after a situation has been interpreted as detrimental, challenging, or stressful to heteronormative gender relations. Mother-blaming accounts encouraged race and class enactments of gender that had negative consequences for women and helped m...

Critical Studies of Nordic Discourses on Gender and Gender Equality

Abstract: Within the Nordic “paradise for women” (Fougner & Asp‐Larsen 1994) there have for decades appeared critical feminist analyses of gender equality, growing in intensity since the 1990s. Today numerou...

Gender Roles in Contemporary Russia: Attitudes and Expectations among Women Students

Abstract: Perhaps it is indeed the man's role to bring home the mammoth, but probably this isn't so true nowadays. In Russia girls think they ought to get married and have children much younger than in many ...

On the Importance of Naming: Gender, Race, and the Writing of Policy History

Abstract: Twenty years ago, just as the study of policy was emerging out of the morass of political history, historians of women rediscovered the state. What I will name the policy turn challenged a kind of intellectual separate sphere in which women's history addressed home, family, and intimate life and left to other historians everything else. The policy turn shifted attention from Carroll Smith Rosenberg's “Female World of Love and Ritual” without losing the self-activity and focus on female difference that investigations of women on their own terms had supplied. It answered the “Politics and Culture” debate of 1980, which revolved around the efficacy of domesticity as an arena for power with a resounding move toward the public, political realm—namely, to social politics. The Reaganite assault on the New Deal order and accompanying New Right attack on women's rights intensified investigation into the origins and growth of a welfare state whose strength seemed precarious and whose history was up for grabs—a welfare state that blurred the separation of private and public and constructed, even as it reinforced, unequal social locations.

Feminism and the Gender Recognition Act 2004

Abstract: This paper argues, first, that the legal construction of transsexualism is a matter of interest, not only to members of the trans community, but to all students of gender, including feminists. The paper then proceeds to explain and analyse, using feminist perspectives, key aspects of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 in the light of the recent caselaw concerning the rights of trans persons. The 2004 Act, it is argued, is a conservative move, which attempts to deny the threat transsexualism poses to the binary system of gender, by instigating a system to formally ‘recognise’ only men and or women. However, the way in which the Act constructs the public/private divide and the mind/body relation carries potential for legal recognition of subject positions which may in a variety of ways be ‘beyond’ the binary system that is currently orthodox. The paper can as such be read as a case study in the legal (re)construction of gender, the gender/sex relation, and the widespread tendency to construct gender conservatively.

Gender, work and education in Britain in the 1950s

Abstract: The 1950s is a comparatively under-researched area for gender studies. Anyone wanting to understand the constructed gender roles which underpinned not only girls' and women's lives but also those of boys and men, would do no better than to start with this excellent book. Stephanie Spencer, in exploring the choices made by school-leavers aged 15 to 18 regarding employment, further education and future career, has found a clever approach to significant issues of women's history in a decade not usually perceived as pregnant with gender issues in the way the war years and their immediate aftermath or the 'swinging sixties' are. Spencer's analysis, however, reveals not only continuity of, even reversal to conventional notions of male/female roles, but also changes sometimes so subtle that those experiencing them were hardly fully aware of them. At the same time economic and technological factors helped a steady rise in married women returning to paid employment once children were in school and thus altered career expectations. By the late 1950s, indeed, women's dual role of home and work was much debated, following a decade when themes of autonomy, independence and citizenship were raised constantly, and when the role of women and the education and employment of girls was under scrutiny.

Sex vs. Gender

Abstract: SUMMARY This article was first published in D. R. Laub and P. Gandy, (eds), Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California, 1973, pp. 20–24. Prince argues that previous contributors to the symposium in using such terms as “gender conversion surgery” and “anatomic and genetic gender” were failing to grasp the distinction between sex and gender. Genital anatomy is about sex; gender role is about a lifestyle. Out of 100 people applying for a surgery perhaps only 10 percent should have it. The majority confuse sex and gender and fail to appreciate that what they are seeking is a gender change and not a sexual change. Prince likes the word “dysphoria” but argues for distinguishing sexual dysphoria from gender dysphoria. They are different and people should be treated according to which one they happen to be suffering from.

Gender in change: gendering change

Abstract: Purpose – To provide a critical review of existing contributions to gender and change management and in doing so highlight how organizational change needs to be read more readily from a gendered perspective.Design/methodology/approach – This paper argues that gender has received little attention regarding the change management side of managerial practice and reviews recent contributions to gender and change to demonstrate this. The paper then questions how men and women both cope with and drive change and whether the identified differences are more than superficial. The concept of gender is then read into management theory in order to understand how gender affects the way managers think and act, and the gendering of management is discussed. The paper concludes by outlining future research areas – change agents, entrepreneurs, female innovators, psychoanalytic treatments of change and gender experiences.Findings – The paper finds that traditional and dominant conceptions of masculine and feminine values th...

Religion, Race, and Gender Differences in Political Ambition

Abstract: Existing studies of political ambition tell two different stories, male and female. Most research on political ambition focuses on the desire of men and women to hold political office at the state or national level and examines the ambitions of those already employed in the labor force. Scholarly inattention to ambition among activists at the local, neighborhood level may lead us to erroneous conclusions about people's motivations for engaging in politics, particularly along racial lines. A focus on those already in the workforce may distort our understanding of the factors that drive the political ambitions of women in particular. This study confirms that men and women have distinct paths of family socialization, qualifications, high school and college socialization, and life situations on the trail to ambition. It also shows that the local context changes the explanations for ambition. In particular, race, combined with the holding of conservative religious beliefs, varies in its impact upon white and minority women's expressions of ambition for future public office. In addition, the experience of sex discrimination has the countersocialization effect of increasing women's ambition.Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2003 meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois and the 2005 meetings of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana. I would like to thank William G. Jacoby, Marcia Moore, the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous comments in the preparation of this manuscript. Also thanks to Kay Lehman Schlozman and David Campbell for their comments and redirection on a much earlier version of this work.

Gender Differences in Gender-Role Attitudes: A Comparative Analysis of Taiwan and Coastal China*

Abstract: New reproductive technologies have the potential to radicalize family life, as they could blur kinship lines, separate biological and social parenthood, and encourage couples to create ‘designer ba...

Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970

Abstract: From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's "Historians in Public" shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people - and often historians - realize. Tyrrell's elegant chronicle of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the government and whether historians should utilize mass media such as film and radio to influence the general public. As "Historians in Public" shows, the utility of history is a distinctive theme throughout the history of the discipline, as is the attempt to be responsive to public issues among pressure groups. A superb examination of the practice of American history since the turn of the century, "Historians in Public" uncovers the often tangled ways history-makers make history - both as artisans and as actors.

Introduction to Special Issue of Social Politics : "Gender, Class, and Capitalism"

Abstract: Restructuring” has emerged as one of the key concepts of contemporary social science as scholars attempt to make sense of profound transformations in political economies welfare states families and communities. Many of these shifts are associated with changing gender relations which figure as both cause and consequence. Women workers have emerged as key actors in this changing and ever more global political economy: Productivity gains sustainable pension systems and the quality and size of the future labor forces depend on women’s decisions about employment childbearing and childrearing—to say nothing of their potential as an electoral bloc. Much recent attention focuses in particular on “work– family reconciliation.” Most governments in the developed world are committed to enhancing or sustaining women’s employment and feminist analysts have focused on gender regimes that differ in the public support given to women’s employment as key to understanding variations in gender equality. This focus in the feminist literature has resulted in a tendency to ascribe differences in gender equality to differences in social policy frameworks which is to say politics. But it has become clear that there is no straightforward link between women’s employment the social policies that support it and gender equality. (excerpt)