Gender Quotas and Gender Mainstreaming:Competing or Complementary Representational Strategies?
Mona Lena KrookDepartment of Political Science
Washington University in St. LouisCampus Box 1063
One Brookings DriveSt. Louis, MO 63130
http://krook.wustl.edu
and
Judith SquiresDepartment of PoliticsUniversity of Bristol
10 Priory RoadBristol BS8 1TUUnited Kingdom
Paper presented at the Fifteenth International Conference of the Council for European Studies, Chicago, IL, March 29-April 2, 2006.
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Gender Quotas and Gender Mainstreaming:Competing or Complementary Representational Strategies?
Over the course of the last decade, two gender equality strategies have gained prominence internationally as a means for promoting women’s political representation. Gender quotas focus on women’s descriptive representation, establishing goals for the selection and election of female candidates to political office. Supported by a variety of international and transnational actors, they have now been adopted by political parties and national legislatures in more than ninety countries (Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2004; Krook forthcoming b). Gender mainstreaming, in contrast, addresses women’s substantive representation, arguing that policy-makers should consider the gendered implications of all public policies in order to assess their differential impact on women and men. Although introduced initially within the framework of the United Nations and the European Union, it has now been transformed into official policy in more than one hundred countries (Hafner-Burton and Pollack 2002; True 2003; True and Mintrom 2001). In many of these cases, quotas and mainstreaming are treated as partner strategies for the empowerment of women through politics (Commission of the European Communities 2000; Organization of American States 2004; Southern African Development Community 1997; United Nations 1995; cf. Meier et al 2004). However, their combined impact on women’s status hinges strongly upon presumed links between the descriptive and substantive representation of women, namely that women in political office are the ones most likely to represent women as a group (cf. Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995; Williams 1998). In actuality, quotas promote women to the ranks of policy-makers, but do not compel them to consider gender when proposing public policy, while mainstreaming requires that policy-makers take gendered effects into account when
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drafting legislation, but does not call for these policy-makers to be women. As such, connections between these two strategies are unclear: do they seek goals that work together, or in opposition, in the quest for greater gender equality?
Answers to this question are important for several reasons. First, they promise new insights into the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, a topic that has been the subject of an extended literature within political science,1 by focusing on both national and international innovations in political representation. Second, they shed light on the aims and limits of quotas and mainstreaming as gender equality strategies, enabling a more nuanced account and evaluation of their goals and accomplishments. Third, they provide a means for comparing and weighing these strategies as efforts to improve women’s representation, thus opening the way for more carefully specified policy proposals. To promote these aims, this paper analyzes quotas and mainstreaming – as well as relations between them – to explore their contributions to theories and practices of political representation. In the first section, we examine each strategy on its own terms. We find that quotas and mainstreaming not only engage separate groups of actors and pursue different types of goals, but also embody distinct conceptions of gender, politics, representation, and equality. We draw on these differences in the second section to explore the ways in which the two strategies conflict and may undermine each other, as well as ways in which they combine and may complement one another. In the third section, we then illustrate these patterns through a case study of the adoption and implementation of quotas and mainstreaming in the United Kingdom. We conclude that careful attention to the relative 1 This literature is extensive. Key contributions include Childs 2004; Dovi 2002; Kymlicka 1995; Mansbridge 2002; Pitkin 1967; Phillips 1995; Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler 2005; Young 1990; Young 2000.
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merits of these two gender equality strategies is crucial for understanding – rather than just assuming – their possibilities for mutual reinforcement.
Quotas and Mainstreaming as Gender Equality Strategies
Policies to promote gender equality have expanded dramatically in recent years, influenced in large part by the mobilization of national and transnational women’s groups and the actions of international and transnational organizations (Berkovitch 1999; Meyer and Prügl 1999; Stiehm 1994). Although they appeared as global strategies around roughly the same time, research on quotas and mainstreaming has developed largely in isolation from one another. Those who investigate quotas focus on electoral politics and similarly track their diffusion around the world (Dahlerup 2006; Krook forthcoming), but also seek to identify reasons for their adoption and non-adoption (Baldez 2004; Krook forthcoming; Krook, Lovenduski, and Squires 2006), as well as for variations in their implementation and impact (Jones 2004; Krook 2005; Murray 2004; Schmidt and Saunders 2004). Those who study mainstreaming, in contrast, focus on public policy and examine its spread across countries (Hafner-Burton and Pollack 2002; Mosesdottir and Erlingsdottir 2005; True and Mintrom 2001), tensions and contradictions in its theory and practice (Eveline and Bacchi 2005; Squires 2005; Verloo 2005; Walby 2005), and limits encountered in its implementation (Hoskyns 1992; Lombardo 2005; Rees 1998; Rees 2005; Squires and Wickham-Jones 2004). Very little work, however, has theorized the conceptual foundations of these strategies in a way that reveals how they converge or diverge in their attempts to promote women’s political representation. Analyzing them together, we discover that quotas and mainstreaming not only engage separate groups of actors and pursue different types of goals, but also
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embody distinct conceptions of gender, politics, representation, and equality.
The Conceptual Foundations of Quotas
Gender quotas appeared as early as the 1930s, but gained prominence around the world in the late 1990s as a new way of selecting political candidates, which differed from earlier policies in that it explicitly acknowledged gender as a criteria for candidate nomination (Krook 2005; Skjeie 1992). Quotas were similarly mentioned in the Beijing Platform for Action under the guise of ‘gender-balanced decision-making,’ but had their roots in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women from 1979. After Beijing, however, other international organizations issued similar recommendations embracing quotas for women, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Socialist International, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Commonwealth, the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, and the Organization of American States (Inter-American Commission of Women 1998; Kandawasvika-Nhundu 2003; Nordlund 2003; Pintat 1998; Russell 2000). These documents framed women’s increased participation as a question of justice and democracy, as well as a means for improving the welfare of all citizens through the values and resources that women might bring with them to the political process (Sawer 2000; cf. Phillips 1995). These arguments – as well as specific proposals for gender quota policies – then diffused rapidly around the world with the help of transnational actors like non-governmental organizations, groups formed under the auspices of international institutions, and formal and informal networks among scholars, activists, and politicians, who shared information across
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national borders regarding effective and ineffective tactics for reform (Htun and Jones 2002; Krook 2003; Krook forthcoming b; Leijenaar 1997; Tripp et al 2006). Their ideas were then taken up by women’s lobby groups, the leaders and members of political parties and, in some cases, legislators and party groups in national parliaments, who required that individual parties increase their selection of female candidates to political office.
The resulting policies take one of three forms: reserved seats, which set aside a certain number of seats for women; party quotas, which aim to increase the proportion of women among party candidates; and legislative quotas, which require parties to nominate a certain percentage of women on their electoral slates (Krook 2005). While specific provisions tend to prevail in particular world regions (Krook 2004), as well as to intervene at distinct points in the candidate selection process (Matland 2006), they all treat women as political actors and thus as the subjects of political processes. As such, they define ‘politics’ narrowly as the formal institutions of political representation, concerning themselves primarily with political elites and the need to include previously excluded or marginalized groups. Their goal is thus a type of proportional or ‘mirror’ representation (Pitkin 1967), focused on the presence – but not necessarily the policy impact – of women as representatives of their sex (Childs 2006). These provisions, however, are not without controversy: they are often the subject of vivid debate between those who support equality of opportunities and those who advocate equality of outcomes. Indeed, in some countries, quotas have been overturned on the grounds that they violate the constitution or laws prohibiting discrimination (Guadagnini 1998; Mossuz-Lavau 1998; Russell 2000). Overall, these patterns indicate that quotas are mainly a strategy focused on changing the personnel involved in formal politics, with much less – or
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at least much more indirect – concern for improving the status of women as a whole.
The Conceptual Foundations of Mainstreaming
Gender mainstreaming emerged in the early 1990s as a new method of policy-making that was distinct from earlier approaches in that it did not seek to add women into existing policies or to identify certain policy areas of specific concern to women. Rather, it aimed to recognize all issues as ones that potentially had different effects on women and men, including those matters that had not traditionally been viewed through a gendered lens (Jahan 1995; Rees 1998; Verloo 1998). Mainstreaming was first established as a global strategy in the Platform for Action ratified by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, but was subsequently endorsed by a wide range of global governance institutions, such as the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the World Bank (Hafner-Burton and Pollack 2002; Rai 2003; Verloo 2001; Walby 2005). These origins meant that it was quickly assimilated within an existing language of development assistance, which treated gender equality instrumentally as a means to promote economic efficiency (Kabeer 2003; Shaw 2005). Its spread across countries – as well as the form that mainstreaming policies eventually took in various countries – was then influenced by the exchange of ideas among women’s groups, civil servants, government ministers, and gender experts (Beveridge and Nott 2002; Russell and Sawer 1999; Sawer 1996). Although it was generally made the responsibility of national machineries for the advancement of women (True and Mintrom 2001; cf. Stetson and Mazur 1995), in most countries it also then became the stated approach of a wide array of public sector organizations.
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Once adopted, mainstreaming generally takes one of two forms: the integrationist approach involves simply adding it to current policy paradigms as a way of more effectively achieving existing policy goals, while the agenda-setting approach entails reorienting these paradigms and rethinking policy ends through consultations with women’s organizations over the form and content of mainstreaming strategies (Jahan 1995; Lombardo 2005; Squires 2005; Walby 2005). Despite differences in policy range, as well as in the range of participants in policy debates, however, all forms of mainstreaming treat women as the objects – rather than the subjects – of public policy, even as they work with a concept of gender rather than sex in order to displace the dominant hold of masculine norm in policy-making. Nonetheless, the integrationist approach embraces a relatively narrow conception of politics, focused mainly on the institutions of government and the bureaucrats and ministers who inhabit then, while the agenda-setting approach broadens this view to incorporate various actors from civil society. All the same, both types of approaches envision a similar goal of representing women’s interests through public policy, rather than through a change in government personnel. They are also widely perceived to represent a third gender equality strategy – distinct from earlier equal treatment approaches, which sought to secure the rights of individuals, and positive action strategies, which aimed to ameliorate the historical disadvantage of oppressed groups – that addresses the systems and structures that cause these patterns in the first place (Rees 2005). Taken together, these features reveal that mainstreaming is primarily a strategy that seeks to alter the gendered norms that inform policy-making, rather than one that facilitates women’s participation directly in the policy-making process.
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Quotas and Mainstreaming as Alternative and Partner Strategies
Despite considerable overlap in the events and actors that have inspired their diffusion, studies on recent developments in gender equalities policies have tended to address quotas and mainstreaming largely in isolation from one another. Consequently, very few scholars have considered at any great length how these two strategies may work together or in opposition in efforts to promote better political representation for women as a group. To foster a debate on these issues, we outline some of the most important conflicts and continuities across the form and content of these two sets of policies. Comparing their primary actors and notions of gender, politics, representation, and equality, we discover strong reasons for considering them to be incompatible – or at least competing – strategies for incorporating women and women’s policy concerns into the political process. We then examine how these elements might also fit together both theoretically and empirically to promote these same ends, concluding that quotas and mainstreaming are ultimately partner strategies for promoting women in politics and policy.
Quotas and Mainstreaming as Competing Strategies
Contrary to the expectations of many national and international actors, several features of quotas and mainstreaming indicate – at least at the conceptual level – that these approaches may in fact constitute competing strategies for gender equality.
Quotas take on a number of different forms, but all provisions privilege the increased presence of female legislators rather than the
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promotion of wider gender equality agendas. As such, they seek only to ameliorate women’s access to political office, rather than to enact a dramatic shift in policy priorities. While limited, this focus on numbers reveals in a relatively straightforward way whether quotas have been successful or not, as the measure involves only counting whether or not more women have been selected and elected as political candidates (Krook 2005), not whether or not they have had a broader impact on policy areas important to women as a group. In some ways, these features make quotas an ‘easier’ strategy to defend and mobilize around – indeed, in many countries they unite supporters across the political spectrum (Kolinsky 1991; Mossuz-Lavau 1998) – precisely because they do not seek to transform public policy, but rather to promote a broader degree of political inclusion. At the same time, however, presumed links between the descriptive and substantive representation of women mean that quotas implicitly place the responsibility for pursuing gender equality on female elected officials, whether or not they are interested in promoting the interests of women as a group (Childs and Krook 2005; Goetz and Hassim 2003). Individual women’s responses to these expectations, in turn, may supplement or challenge existing mainstreaming policy initiatives: while evidence from numerous cases suggests that women-friendly policy originates with female legislators (Schwindt-Bayer 2004; Swers 2004), other studies find that not all women in politics aim to represent women’s concerns (Carroll 2001; Childs 2004), while some men in politics are strong advocates of women’s issues (Celis 2004; Flammang 1985). These patterns are further complicated by the fact that quotas and mainstreaming address fundamentally different structures within the political process: quotas focus on the vertical distribution of power within party and parliamentary structures, while mainstreaming entails the horizontal flow of initiatives across departmental boundaries, meaning that a precise mapping of
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descriptive features onto substantive elements of political representation will be imperfect at best. Moreover, the distance between these two facets of representation is compounded by the notion of equality that informs quota policies, which seeks to address the lack of parity within elected assemblies rather than systemic patterns of exclusion across civil society. As a result, quotas focus exclusively on political participation as the primary indicator of gender equality, dramatically reducing and restricting the broad gender equality remit of mainstreaming policies.
Although individual policy-makers understand and apply mainstreaming in a variety of different ways (Booth and Bennett 2002), all versions of mainstreaming undermine the need for more women in politics, as policy-makers – whether or not they are women or men – are expected to consider the gendered implications of all public policies. Indeed, the focus on ‘gender,’ rather than ‘women,’ acknowledges the relevance of men’s lives to gender equality policies, thus empowering male bureaucrats and legislators in mainstreaming debates. While this turn to gender has the potential to make the strategy more transformative (Rees 1998), it also removes the ‘epistemic privilege’ of female policy-makers, who are no longer seen as the only ones capable of drafting gender equality legislation. These tendencies are exacerbated by the policy frames of economic efficiency – as opposed to principles of democratic fairness – that were initially drawn upon to legitimize mainstreaming within international circles (Hancock 1999; Kenner 2000; True 2003). In the process, mainstreaming reduces the need to focus on electoral politics as a way to promote women’s status, as it not only removes the onus on political parties to respond to women’s movement demands, but also ostensibly replaces the need for women’s movement mobilization itself. In their place, it elevates experts and bureaucrats as the central
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political actors, who may be put in charge of mainstreaming public policy with or without any specific background in gender issues (Razavi and Miller 1995; Kardam 2000). The most common strategy involves simply retraining the actors who are already part of the policy-making process, rather than incorporating new actors – specifically women inside the political parties – who were previously the main source of information on ways to combat gender inequalities (Lovecy 2002; Teghtsoonian 2003; Woodward 2001). Mainstreaming thus entails a firm shift away from a ‘politics of presence’ to a ‘politics of ideas’ (Phillips 1995), or a move away from women’s descriptive representation, which requires an increased number of women in political office, towards their substantive representation, which mandates only increased attention to gender in the making of public policy. As a result, mainstreaming may erode support for ‘women-only’ policies – the staple of the early gender equality strategies of equal treatment and positive action – by framing them as ‘old-fashioned’ and focused solely on ameliorating women’s conditions to the exclusion of men.
Quotas and Mainstreaming as Complementary Strategies
Despite these conceptual tensions, quotas and mainstreaming share substantial continuities and complementarities in terms of their ultimate goals of promoting gender equality. Indeed, analyzing them as potential partners reveals a number of important theoretical and practical advantages for pursuing them in conjunction with one another. First, treating women as both objects and subjects of politics allows for a more flexible and sophisticated conception of gender, while also retaining a focus on women as a group. More specifically, it
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creates greater fluidity among the categories of policy actor and policy recipient by recognizing that these are not absolute, but frequently overlap with and even contradict one another with regard to the preferences of individual women. Second, operating with a wider definition of politics that includes both parliamentary and policy arenas points to numerous ways in which different sites of representation may, and often do, reinforce one another. In many cases, for example, female politicians and bureaucrats work together to propose, pass, and implement mainstreaming policies (cf. Eschle 2000; True 2003). Third, focusing on a broader range of political actors – rather than simply one set in isolation from another – sheds light on how the concerns of a politics of presence may intersect with a politics of ideas. In certain instances, the numbers of women in parliament may play a crucial role in influencing the precise form of mainstreaming – namely, technocratic or transformative – that is ultimately adopted, depending both on policy-making procedures and the preferences of individual female legislators ((Razavi and Miller 1995; Kardam 2000; True 2003). Fourth, exploring the links between the descriptive and substantive representation of women exposes the issue to empirical scrutiny, rather than simply assuming that they overlap completely or not at all. The available evidence is mixed, but suggests that while these two facets of representation may not directly correspond to one another, they may nonetheless be mutually reinforcing (Veitch 2005). Fifth, incorporating multiple definitions of equality uncovers a range of possibilities regarding interventions to change the means and ends of the political process. Indeed, separating them analytically points to a variety of ways in which particular policy reforms may pursue and meet wider normative goals of inclusion and fair treatment. Thus, a number of theoretical and practical considerations indicate the ultimate compatibility between mainstreaming and quotas as gender equality strategies. The exact
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degree of their fit with one another, however, remains an empirical question.
Case Study: Quotas and Mainstreaming in the United Kingdom
As policy strategies, quotas and mainstreaming first appeared on the political agenda in the United Kingdom in the early to mid-1990s. As was the case elsewhere, most research on these policies has proceeded largely in isolation from one another, the main exception being anthologies (Breitenbach and Mackay 2001; Dobrowolsky and Hart 2003) or special issues of journals (British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004; Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 55, no. 1, 2002) that survey recent developments in gender and British politics. To overcome this gap, and thus establish how these policies might compete with or complement one another in one particular case, we present a brief history of quotas and mainstreaming in the UK and consider how these strategies involve different actors and reflect distinct notions of gender, politics, representation, and equality. We then explore the conflicts and continuities across these specific policies to offer some initial insights into the ways in which the adoption and implementation of quotas and mainstreaming together promote – or undermine – a broader understanding of women’s political representation.
Quotas in the United Kingdom
Proposals to institute quotas for women in British politics first emerged in the Labour Party in the 1980s, following some sporadic attempts by women inside the party in the 1970s to mobilize for the selection of more female candidates (Rasmussen 1983; Vallance 1984). Although their efforts did not get very far, the situation began
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to change in the early 1980s when several new parties emerged and Labour experienced successive electoral defeats, which led to a series of attempts over the course of the 1980s and 1990s to revise its image as a working man’s party (Perrigo 1996). Taking a cue from the Social Democratic and Liberal parties – later the Liberal Democrats – who sought to promote female candidates through compulsory shortlisting policies (Lovenduski and Randall 1993; Vallance 1984), women inside the party proposed and the party conference eventually approved in 1993 a policy of all-women shortlists in half of all seats that the party expected to win in the next elections. Although these quotas were eventually declared illegal in 1996, they produced a major increase in the number of women in the House of Commons, from 9% in 1993 to 18% in 1997, and led to a series of innovative strategies in Scotland and Wales to ensure the election of women to the new devolved assemblies, leading to the election of 38% women to the Scottish Parliament and 43% women to the National Assembly for Wales in 1999. To achieve this, the Scottish and Welsh Labour parties adopted a ‘twinning’ strategy whereby constituencies would be paired according to geography and winnability, and then a woman would be selected to one constituency and a man as the candidate for the other, while the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru considered – and in the case of the former – rejected proposals to ‘zip’ party lists to ensure the equal representation of women and men (Russell, Mackay, and McAllister 2002). Although quotas were not reintroduced for general elections in 2001, a small drop in the proportion of women in parliament inspired legal reforms to allow, but not require, parties to apply positive action when selecting candidates to political office. These changes inspired parties in Scotland and Wales to slightly adjust their candidate selection procedures in 2003, which led to a jump in women’s representation to 43% and 50% respectively, and the UK Labour Party to reintroduce all-women shortlists in half of all
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seats where Labour MP’s were retiring, which produced a small increase in the percentage of women elected to the House of Commons in 2005 (Childs, Campbell, and Lovenduski 2005; Krook and Squires 2006).
The main actors in these debates were primarily women’s groups inside the political parties, who pressed party leaders and participants in party conferences to support provisions for all-women shortlists, twinning, and zipping (Brooks, Eagle, and Short 1990; Coote and Pattullo 1990; Gelb 1989; Lovenduski and Randall 1993; McDougall 1998). Although party leaders in several instances sought to institute weaker quota policies (Norris 1997a), the women’s campaigns were bolstered by contacts with women’s groups in other socialist and social democratic parties across Western Europe, where quotas had been applied with great success in terms of increasing the numbers of women contesting and winning elections (Russell 2005; Short 1996). In Scotland and Wales, women’s mobilization intersected with campaigns for devolution, which enabled them to gain a commitment to equal representation in the new assemblies, as well as provisions for women to help achieve this outcome (Brown et al 2002; Galloway and Robertson 1991). In the case of Wales, however, the British Labour Party also proved crucial to quota adoption, as these measures were passed by the larger party conference (Bradbury et al 2000; Russell, Mackay, and McAllister 2002). These events indicate sustained attention to the issue of nominating more female candidates to political office, but interestingly, in none of these debates were any provisions made to ensure the selection of candidates who promised to promote women’s issues. Indeed, the goal of quota policies was simply to ensure more women among those elected to office, not to expand the policy representation of women within political assemblies as a whole. As such, these policies remained strongly tied to notions
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of descriptive but not substantive representation, despite strong expectations among party women, the media, and many female candidates that dramatic changes would occur in political priorities and policy output with the advent of more women (Childs 2002; Childs 2004). The most contentious debates, instead, revolved around the legality of positive action in candidate selection, given existing definitions of equality within British law as an equality of opportunities and not an equality of outcomes (Russell 2003; Squires 1996). Such legal concerns were voiced almost immediately after the approval of all-women shortlists within the Labour Party, leading to accusations that these policies violated the terms of the Sex Discrimination Act (Lovenduski 1997; Norris 1997a), as well as several European and international human and equal rights treaties (Eagle and Lovenduski 1998; Russell 2000). When the policy was overturned, this event strongly influenced decisions in Scotland and Wales to opt for a twinning strategy, which would produce the same results as all-women shortlists but would be more difficult to challenge legally as men would no longer be excluded from selection processes (Russell, Mackay, and McAllister 2002). The impact of these policies, in turn, helped garner support for eventual reform of the Sex Discrimination Act, although on terms that do not promote, but simply do not prohibit, positive action in candidate selection. These developments point to the very narrow conception of ‘gender equality’ embodied in quota policies, which is limited only to increasing the prospects for women to be selected and elected as political candidates.
Mainstreaming in the United Kingdom
Gender mainstreaming was introduced into British politics in the late 1990s (a decade after proposals for quotas). The implementation of
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mainstreaming in Whitehall followed the creation of a Minister for Women and a new women’s policy agency. The Minister for Women and the Women’s Unit (WU) were established in June 1997, following Tony Blair’s landslide election victory, and mainstreaming was introduced with the publication of ‘Policy appraisal for equal treatment’ guidelines in November 1998 (Squires and Wickham-Jones 2002). There had been no sustained campaign for mainstreaming amongst women in the political parties or female MPs, though there had been calls for the creation of a Minister for Women. The adoption of mainstreaming followed by recommendation by the European Commission in the Fourth Community Action Programme (1996-2000) that mainstreaming be adopted by all member states. By 2001 almost all member states had put in place some formal mechanism for gender mainstreaming (Rubery 2002; Mackay and Bilton 2003). In line with an agenda-setting model of mainstreaming, the WU collected information regarding women’s concerns and undertook research about the issues concerning teenage girls and about the pay gap between women and men. In 1999 the WU carried out a large-scale consultation exercise, Listening to Women. In 2001, following the general election the WU was restructured as the Women and Equality Unit, taking responsibility for policy on gender equality issues, including sex discrimination act and equal pay. It became sponsor for the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Women’s National Commission. The Unit’s remit was to improve the position of women in ‘measurable’ ways and to promote equality generally regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Gender impact assessments are carried out within departments, though with considerable variation in levels of commitment between departments (Squires and Wickham-Jones 2004; Veitch 2005). Mainstreaming has been most actively pursued in those departments headed by a Minister for Women (eg. DTI), ‘or including those ministers with a keen interest’ (Veitch 2005:603) The
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Gender Equality Public Service Agreement (2003) is ‘arguably the most powerful gender mainstreaming tool’ (Veitch 2005:603) as departments are required to report publicly on the targets contained within them and their achievements are monitored by the Treasury. The WEU has responsibility for reporting on the Public Service Agreements. Although the gender mainstreaming post within the Unit was abolished, work continued at a ministerial level via the Cabinet Committee on Women, which was subsequently renamed the Cabinet Committee on Equality, with a remit to co-ordinate the government’s policies on equality issues generally (Veitch, 2005:602). The Cabinet Committee on Equality was subsumed into a Cabinet Committee on Communities following the 2005 election (Veitch, 2005:602).Mainstreaming is increasingly carried out in relation to other equality issues, including race and disability. The WEU has played a central role in the consultation regarding the establishment of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, which would merge the existing equality commissions. It is likely that with the creation of the CEHR the WEU will become an Equality Unit, responsible for all six equality strands (see Squires forthcoming). This is likely to increase the tendency to pursue mainstreaming in relation to equalities generally rather than gender in particular.
Gender mainstreaming has also been implemented in the newly established assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where is has taken a more agenda-setting form involving greater civil society participation (Mackay and Bilton, 2000; Chaney, 2002; Donaghy and Kelly, 2001). The devolved governments have made much stronger commitments to mainstreaming than the central United Kingdom government (Rubery 2002:504), and have created consultation exchanges between non-governmental groups and the policy administration (Donaghy and Kelly, 2001).
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In contrast to the debates about quotas, there has been little discussion about the government’s mainstreaming strategy in Whitehall, either within the parties or amongst women’s organisations. The actors involved in mainstreaming have been government ministers, career civil servants, and a small number of ‘gender experts’. The Minister for Women and Deputy Minister for Women, are unpaid positions: the portfolio is shared with another post, and there has been a high turn-over of people filling these roles since 1997 (Squires and Wickham-Jones 2004). Within the WU and WEU there is a core permanent staff of Cabinet Office civil servants, civil servants on secondment from their department, plus a third of the staff are external experts from the private and voluntary sector (Squires and Wickham-Jones 2004). The work of the Women’s National Commission, brings women in civil society organizations into the mainstreaming process via its member organizations (Stokes, 2003). The WEU aims to ensure that policymakers incorporate a ‘gender perspective’ into policies (WEU website), and that their policies deliver equality of opportunity to women and men. Since its inception, the Units have oscillated between a focus on sex and gender. Their early priorities included women at work and women in public life. Yet, whilst the key gender public service agreements focus on women’s economic participation and advancement, and women’s social and civil inclusion, a recent progress report (March 2005) evaluates ‘broader gender equality work going on across government’, which includes raising boys’ achievements in school and men in childcare. More recently, there is an increasing emphasis on diversity amongst ‘users’, not only by sex or gender, but also by race, disability, age, religion and sexuality. There are few hard indicators of the impact of mainstreaming, though its appears to have had most
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impact where it can be show to improve the efficiency and impact of policies (Veitch 2005:605)
Mainstreaming and Quotas as Competing and Complementary Strategies Consideration of quotas and mainstreaming in the UK reveal the two strategies to be competing in various regards. Firstly, to the extent that gender equality strategies compete for public attention quota strategies may limit the attention given to the more complex mainstreaming strategy. The campaigns for quotas have focused attention of the increased presence of female legislators, with mainstreaming strategies receiving relatively little public or party political attention. Whereas the introduction of the Labour Party’s all-women shortlists policy was controversial and subject to high profile campaigns, both for an against, there has been a notable absence of debate regarding the normative desirability of mainstreaming. Quotas have proven to be an easier strategy to mobilize around. As a result – and despite the fact that they have generated more controversy than a mainstreaming strategy – quotas have had a greater impact on the political agenda in the UK. It is possible that this works to detract attention from mainstreaming processes, which have relied on the more technical tools of gender disaggregated statistics, gender-sensitive policymaking, and gender differentiated policy outcomes. Secondly, the strategies may also be competing in relation to their derivation and motivation. Where mainstreaming has been discussed, gender experts and civil servants have tended to argue for its introduction with women in civil society organizations expressing concern that mainstreaming may deflect attention away from a ‘women-only’ policy agenda. This suggests that in Britain
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quotas have been a ‘bottom-up’ strategy’ whereas mainstreaming has been a ‘top-down’ one. Thirdly, the introduction of gender mainstreaming has gradually given way to a wider concern with equalities mainstreaming, reducing the focus on the category of women. The gender machinery is being replaced by equalities machinery. This may, in time, erode support of gender quotas, which do not allow for considerations of intersectionality. More pragmatically, the merger of women’s policy agencies, such as the Equal Opportunities Commission, into a single equality body, may reduce the resources and support for future quota campaigns. Fourthly, whereas quotas campaigns have been framed in relation to democratic justice, mainstreaming has tended to be framed in Britain in relation to ‘the business case’ of improving user satisfaction, where users are diverse. This differs from a rights-based argument for mainstreaming, which has been deployed elsewhere, by prioritizing a pragmatic case for mainstreaming. Finally, it is much easier to evaluate the impact of quotas than it is to assess the impact of mainstreaming, which has allowed the government to endorse mainstreaming without actually doing very much. Its claim to have a twin-track equality strategy, embracing equality of opportunities and mainstreaming, may provide it with a rationale for not renewing the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act when its sunset clause comes into operation.
However, there are also indications that these two strategies are complementary. Firstly, evidence suggests that the presence of feminist actors makes a difference to the extent to which mainstreaming is implemented: ‘the development of gender expertise within government is dependent on political patronage of the mainstreaming process, and that still largely rests with women politicians’ (Veitch, 2005:605). This suggests that
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the effective use of quotas to increase the number of female parliamentarians may be a precondition for the effective implementation of a mainstreaming strategy. The fact that mainstreaming is perceived to be more effective in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, than in the central UK administration lends support to this possibility, given that these assemblies have significantly higher levels of female representation. Secondly, effective agenda-setting mainstreaming strategies have facilitated new forms of participation by women’s organizations in government (such as the Listening to Women, and Voices initiatives), which may cultivate participatory democracy and generate increased concern about levels of female participation in national legislatures, thereby providing greater support for quota strategies.
Conclusions
We conclude that careful attention to the relative merits of these two gender equality strategies is crucial for understanding – rather than just assuming – their possibilities for mutual reinforcement. Detailed consideration of quota and mainstreaming strategies in particular contexts will help to establish the extent to which mainstreaming and quotas are in fact compatible and overlapping solutions, as opposed to competing and distinct policy forms and goals. There are clearly both conceptual and practical differences between the two strategies. Conceptually, these differences focus around the distinct conceptions of gender, politics, representation and equality deployed in each strategy. Quotas focus on women, thereby entailing a risk of essentialism; whereas mainstreaming privileges gender, thereby entailing a risk of marginalizing the policy focus on women. Quotas
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focus on parties and parliament, thereby embracing a fairly narrow institutional vision of politics; whereas mainstreaming traverses a wider terrain aiming to establish links between civil society actors, politicians, bureaucrats and experts. Quotas focus on descriptive representation whilst mainstreaming draws out attention to issues of substantive representation. Quotas are a form of positive action, whilst mainstreaming is held to represent a third equality approach, distinct from the equal treatment and positive action approaches. Yet it remains an open question as to whether these differences render the strategies competing or complementary. Our preliminary survey of the interaction between the two strategies in the UK suggests that the best strategy to represent women – in both the substantive and descriptive sense – is to pursue mainstreaming and quotas as a dual strategy. All the same, there are important limits to both as representational strategies: not all women represent women’s interests while in political office, while numerous practical problems preclude the full implementation of mainstreaming strategies. The evidence from the UK suggests that quotas provide an important resource that facilitates the effective implementation of mainstreaming.
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