Targeted Measures Versus Change of Political Culture: How Can Gender Equality Best Be Achieved?

Abstract

Following the policy cycle, some decisive steps could be described: feminist actors generate a politics of visibility that still is the starting point of every European gender equality reform. To be successful, a politics of framing must fit into uncontroversial, conventional perceptions of gender, democracy and the state. Besides an appropriate cognitive structure, financial, temporal and institutional resources need to be made available for women/mothers and men/fathers; the sustainability of every other reform rests on this politics of facilities. Governmental actors adopt societal ideas of reform and adapt them to state arenas in a politics of translation that is marked by tensions between state feminism and the bureaucratisation of feminism. At this historic moment in Europe, successful translation and implementation of gender equality reforms could best be argued within a conservative framing, especially difference-feminist arguments. Paradoxically, such frames seem to be best to override reactionary frames.