Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

This chapter explores the proposition that how gender is conceptualised has implications for the efficacy of gender mainstreaming and gender analysis as change processes. It makes the case that gender is a contested concept, that it can be defined in ways that reproduce male, white, able-bodied privilege, or in other ways that reduce certain inequalities. In particular it develops in some depth our suggestion that both gender analysis and gender mainstreaming be conceptualised as always incomplete, thus ‘unfinished business’, rather than as fixed categories of analysis. The goal here is to shift attention from the idea that we may ‘have’ either a gender or a gender mainstreaming policy/program to the continual effort involved in fixing or ‘doing’ the gendered subject or in giving ‘content’ (meaning) to gender mainstreaming.

The chapter begins with a brief history of ‘gender’ as a political concept within feminist theory. It explains how the theorising of masculinities and the growing attention to differences among women put the utility of the concept in dispute, and how the 1970s idea of a sex/gender distinction was found wanting. We make the case that part of the problem with the category ‘gender’ is the common way in which it is conceptualised as a part of a person rather than as a process that is ongoing, contested and incomplete. Thinking about gender as a verb, or as a gerund (gendering), we suggest, is more likely to capture how gender differentiation is continually ‘done’ through discursively-mediated institutional and organisational processes, including policymaking.

Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

Previous chapters have made reference to the need to rethink policy as a creative (productive or constitutive) process. The major purpose of this chapter is to clarify what this means and to illustrate the usefulness of this way of thinking about policy for studying gender mainstreaming and gender analysis. The specific focus is ‘gender proofing’ in Ireland and ‘gender impact assessment’ in the Netherlands.

The underlying proposition in thinking about policies as productive, or as constitutive, is that policies and policy proposals give shape and meaning to the ‘problems’ they purport to ‘address’. That is, policy ‘problems’ do not exist ‘out there’ in society, waiting to be ‘solved’ through timely and perspicacious policy interventions. Rather, specific policy proposals ‘imagine’ ‘problems’ in particular ways that have real and meaningful effects. Hence, to understand how policies operate requires that we ask of policy proposals ‘What's the Problem represented to be?’. This question forms the starting place for Bacchi's (1999; 2009a) novel method of policy analysis (elaborated below), captured in the acronym WPR.

The proposition that ‘problems’ do not ‘exist’ ‘out there’ in society does not ignore or downplay the full range of troubling conditions, including the subordination of women, that characterise social relations. Instead, it insists that how ‘problems’ are represented in policies – how they are discursively produced – affects the particular understanding given to those conditions at points in time and space, and that these understandings matter.

This book is about change and how it happens. It draws upon the research and experiences of its contributors to provide glimpses into the challenges facing those who care to produce more egalitarian relationships between and among women and men, and into the ‘spaces’ found within constraints to advance such an agenda. Its specific topic is gender analysis, a form of policy analysis associated with the equality policy initiative called gender mainstreaming.

The setting for the production of the book involved a large Linkage Grant project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), entitled ‘Gendering impact assessment: A new framework for producing gender-inclusive policy’. The authors of this volume, Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline, located in South Australia and Western Australia respectively, were the Chief Investigators for the project. Our Linkage partners included, in South Australia, the Office for Women (OFW) and, in Western Australia, the Office for Women's Policy (OWP) and the Health Department. A number of other public sector agencies in both states were participants (for details see Chapter 3). The project involved a PhD student, Karen Vincent, and several Research Associates (Jennifer Binns and Susan Harwood in Western Australia; Katy Osborne, Zoe Gordon and Catherine Mackenzie in South Australia), who became co-authors of some papers and reports, some of which are published here.

The goal of the project was to design gender analysis procedures appropriate to the respective contexts of the public service in the two states.

Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

This chapter applies the concept of ‘doing’ to the practices of feminist researchers. Under scrutiny are the ways in which unexamined presumptions about the main business of gender mainstreaming as gender equality foreclose consideration of the lives and experiences of specific groups of women, here Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Following from Chapters 10, 11 and 12, the chapter emphasises the critical importance of collaborative spaces to the character and shape of egalitarian politics.

The chapter highlights the continuing dispute in feminist communities about whether or not the term ‘diversity mainstreaming’ better reflects current sensitivities to differences among women, commonly described as an ‘intersectional’ sensitivity. It shows how the South Australian research team in the Gender Analysis Project dealt with this issue, deciding to include ‘race and cultural analysis’ within a gender analysis guide (SAGA).

This decision, as we describe, was not, as might first appear, a compromise position. Rather, non-Aboriginal members of the group accepted that Aboriginal women were best placed to articulate a political vision of use to their communities – a vision based on the identity of those communities. This acceptance compelled those non-Aboriginal members to rethink assumptions about the obviousness of gender as an analytical priority. This rethinking is an outcome of what we describe in the book as the process of reflexivity – finding ways to reflect critically on one's own starting points for thinking (all the while recognising that there are no agentic subjects who can invariably avoid traps of discursive positioning).

Introduction: Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi

There is considerable research showing that organisations, including government agencies and the policies they produce, consider gender irrelevant to their core business. The gender mainstreaming of policy is designed to challenge such an assumption, using the argument that mainstreaming gender can ‘transform’ the ubiquity of genderblind policies. Various countries, as this book (among others) shows, have developed particular methods and tool kits for transforming the outcomes of their policies, in order that those policies take seriously the relevance of gender.

This chapter underscores the question of gender (ir)relevance, and how it is produced by complex organisational practices. It turns to feminist organisational theory to analyse the institutionalised practices that construct and organise policy priorities (see Chapter 6). In agreement with Benschop and Verloo (2006), we argue that effective gender mainstreaming cannot be achieved without attention to the specific organisational sites in which policy is developed and implemented. The chapter draws on the ‘turn to practice’ in organisational studies, and feminist strategies of ‘sudden seeing’, to consider what our insights from the gender analysis study might offer future interventionist projects.

Western Australia furnishes most of the examples used in the chapter, although general descriptions of the project's aims and challenges apply also to South Australia. The starting point for the chapter is our finding in Western Australia that it was only through doing the gender analysis in their organisational contexts that policy actors came to see the relevance of gender to policy.

Introduction: Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi

This chapter examines the primary organising processes which produce the meanings of policy statements. It outlines and inspects the social power circumscribing these policy statements, the relations of power and resistance involved in such statements, and their effects on those subject to the policy.

The previous chapter outlined how the WPR approach concentrates on the constitutive effects of existing or proposed policies, showing how the characterising of policy ‘problems’ within those policies or proposals (what the ‘problem’ is represented to be) ‘shapes’ (or constitutes) people as particular kinds of subjects. This chapter pursues the point that policies elicit subjectivities, rather than determine them (Dean 1999: 32). It highlights the always-incomplete nature of subjectification processes, emphasising that the subjects of policy are always more than the products of policy regulation, whether explicit or implicit, as is the case in problem representations. In this view political subjects, both those who ‘do’ policy and those to whom it is ‘done’, are both subjected and resistant to policy discourses. A particular focus of this chapter and of the book is how ‘doing’ policy both produces and enables the subjectivities of those who analyse and develop it, including ourselves as researchers.

The influences of feminist poststructuralism and recent organisational theory shape the propositions in this chapter. It was prompted by our wish as authors to fill a gap in our earlier and later chapters.

Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

As with the previous chapter this article was written in the lead-up to the commencement of the Gender Analysis Project. It pursues the increasing controversy about whether or not gender mainstreaming ought to be considered a victory for feminist reformers. This debate was generated in part due to the proliferation of gender mainstreaming initiatives in organisations and states with free market agendas and the associated removal of women's policy units and positive action initiatives. Those who believed that mainstreaming was in fact resistant to free market liberalism tended to argue that the expansion of state activities associated with the reform challenged the neoliberal focus on small government.

Our contribution to this debate emphasises the need to recognise that neoliberalism is not anti-state but that it encourages a particular kind of state, one that steers from a distance. Hence there is no necessary tension between neoliberalism and forms of gender mainstreaming that focus on strengthening the political arm of government.

We also develop the hypothesis that the degree of resistance or complicity between gender mainstreaming and neoliberalism is related to the form of gender mainstreaming (or gender analysis) introduced. Following from Chapter 1 the case is made that a ‘differences’ model of gender analysis rests on individualist premises that provide some congruence with neoliberalism, while a ‘gender relations’ approach is more likely to be resistant.

Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

This article was written prior to the commencement of the Gender Analysis Project, discussed in the Introduction. Reflecting Bacchi's policy background, it focuses primarily on connections between how policy is theorised and divergent models of gender analysis. This focus remains a theme throughout the chapters to follow, especially in Chapter 5. Eveline's influence is apparent towards the end of the article, where reference is made to ways of engaging policy workers in the organisational change process (see Eveline and Booth 2002; Eveline and Harwood 2002). Her breakthrough contribution to rethinking asymmetrical power relations between women and men as ‘the politics of advantage’ is also introduced (see Eveline 1994). The authors' shared commitment to recognising power as a generative force is captured in the term ‘gendering’ (Eveline 2005).

Bacchi's primary purpose in the article is to alert readers to the existence of different frameworks for gender analysis and to suggest that, in terms of prospects for progressive change, the framework adopted matters. She identifies conceptual limitations in the dominant mode of gender analysis, which she calls a ‘differences approach’. She also explores the potential for change in the Netherlands ‘gender relations’ approach, which starts from the premise that there are inequitable power relations between women and men.

Bacchi's major concern with both these models is the continuing tendency to consider policy as a reaction to the ‘problem’ of gender inequality.

We decided to produce this compilation of articles, in the main published elsewhere, because we thought it worthwhile to reflect on developments in our thinking in connection with a large research project on gender analysis of policy. Over four years, as laid out in more detail in the Introduction, we were the Chief Investigators for an ARC-funded Linkage grant project to assist in the design of gender analysis procedures for the South Australian and Western Australian public sectors. In the lead-up to and over the course of the project (referred to as the Gender Analysis Project or GAP) we collaborated closely in the production of papers which became articles that traced the ‘learnings’ generated by the project. We are grateful to the various journal publishers for the opportunity to reprint these articles. Previously published articles are listed at the end of this preface.

Because the published articles necessarily include essential background information, there will inevitably be some repetition. Some themes also reappear in several chapters. We hope that this repetition does not prove onerous to readers. All articles were approved for publication by the relevant industry partners.

Reviewing the published material, and again in close collaboration, we decided that there was something to be learned from examining the themes developed in these articles and from considering how our specific theoretical backgrounds shaped these themes. In the process of undertaking this task we realised that some of the underlying theoretical premises that grounded these analyses might well be less visible to readers than to us.

This collection of essays establishes the claim that it is unwise to think about ‘gender mainstreaming’ or ‘gender analysis’ as sets of procedures that necessarily make useful changes when they are put into place as policies. Rather we direct attention to the on-the-ground political deliberations (at every level of social interaction) that affect what gets done and who gets to do it. It is the ‘doings’, the practices, that generate long-term learning and commitment, and that create the possibility that gender analysis can have some impact over time on the asymmetrical power relations between women and men (Chapters 7, 10 and 13).

The implications for policy development are significant. One overriding message is the need to create the time and space for public servants both to reflect upon the nature of ‘gender analysis’ and to participate actively in applying it. As Chapter 12 makes explicit, in the GAP project those who were personally engaged in the work of gender analysis were the ones most likely to come to see its relevance. As also noted in that chapter, those policy workers tended, in the main, to be women with lesser institutional authority. It follows, as argued there, that, if gender analysis is to become a meaningful and useful equality initiative, all policymakers, especially those in positions of institutional authority, need to ‘do’ gender analysis.

As part of this ‘doing’, there is need for reflection on the concepts and categories produced as part of the gender analysis exercise, for example, ‘gender’, ‘equality’, ‘difference’.