Gender expertise and policy analysis

Chapter Fourteen explores gender expertise and policy analysis. To gender policy analysis requires the expertise to apply gender as a variable in the processes that generate policy analysis. A variety of individuals and institutions in society, from academic to women’s policy agencies, provide gender expertise through activities including gender audits, gender budgeting, research and analysis, gender consultation, gender training, and gender assessments. Considering gender expertise permits us to make visible the types of knowledge that qualify as expertise, the conditions under which such knowledge has resonance with policy makers and can claim policy success. Understanding the barriers preventing the successful application of gender equality policies gives insights into how and why gender inequality persists.

Gender Justice in Feminist Analysis of Public Policies in Argentina, Brazil and Chile

This paper presents part of the authors’ postdoctoral research at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. It focuses on the transformation processes triggered by feminist-driven governmental actions in Brazil, Argentina and Chile over the last few years, especially during the terms of Cristina Fernández, Dilma Rousseff and Michele Bachelet. Using concepts and theoretical insights from specialized literature, we address questions about lobbying and disputes in the political arena in order to understand the impact of feminisms on public policies, and the extent to which these policies relate to the intersectional nature of discrimination (gender, race / ethnicity, class). Four major public policies areas are examined, namely economic autonomy, social facilities, health, and violence, from three analytical angles: 1) the role of women’s policy agencies in policy making processes; 2) Gender-Aware Public Policies during the mandates of female presidents in Argentina, Brasil e Chile; 3) the intersectionality of gender justice in public policy-making.

Movement Institutions: The Bureaucratic Sources of Feminist Protest

Over the past several decades, scholarship on women's movements, feminism, and the state has brought renewed attention to the study of protest politics by questioning its frontier with dominant institutions. This article takes this critique a step further by considering the institutional dimension of the state-movement intersection. Drawing on the French case, we argue that institutions that are formally devoted to women's rights inside the state (women's policy agencies) can operate asmovement institutions—that is, as bureaucratic instances routinely engrained with a protest dimension—rather than being only a shelter for a network of insider activists. As such, they can provide a specific, institutional feminist socialization to their members; they can purvey, rather than only relay, feminist protest, and they can deploy institutional repertoires of protest, combining bureaucratic and movement dimensions. We conclude that the definition and boundaries of the women's movement need to be broadened to include bureaucratic sources of feminist protest.

Between survival and relevance: remaking 30 years of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs

Since its establishment in 1984 the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has had a controversial profile.1 What began as a feminist policy agency in the public sector discernibly transitioned, in the course of a decade, into a mainstream policy agency whose function is to focus on issues of relevance to women (Curtin and Teghtsoonian, 2010). The ministry’s distinctive location at the crossroads of policy and gender places it in a maelstrom of contradictory expectations; like other women’s policy agencies elsewhere in the world, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has historically been caught between expectations from community to be its advocate, on the one hand, and requirements from the public sector to conform to the standards of new public management on the other.