Understanding Europe: the case of gender+ equality policies

The continuing enlargement of the European Union is not only a challenge to its citizens, its politicians and its policy makers. The materialisation of Europe as a whole is just as much a challenge for academics because dominant theories have been developed and tested mainly in Western Europe. Changes in Europe require changes in data collection, data analysis and in theory too.

QUING contributes to this. In its aim to compare gender equality policies across Europe, it is both modest and ambitious. It is modest because it focuses on just one case, gender equality policies, and asks rather straightforward questions, such as: what is the content of gender equality policies in the EU-27 plus Croatia and Turkey? What kind of differences and similarities can be found? It is ambitious, because it does pioneering work and gathers new data for the whole of Europe.

With its original data collection and analysis, QUING will first answer two big questions: what is the nature of gender equality policies in the practice of national and European policy making, what does gender equality mean in these policies, what are these policies trying to do? And also: what is the quality of these current policies, especially in terms of their transformative potential? Do they pay attention to other inequalities? And are they open for voices of the movements that lay at its origin?

For its analysis, QUING can build on the methodology of Critical Frame Analysis that has been developed for the MAGEEQ project. To be feasible, three issues relevant to gender equality policies are studied more specifically: gender-based violence, intimate citizenship and non-employment. Additionally, general gender equality policies, and policies on equality machinery or architecture are analysed. The collection of studies will provide a better understanding of the differences and similarities, and of the quality of gender equality policies. They should enable the construction of new typologies that will be relevant to the whole of Europe. QUING started presenting results in January 2009, and will be concluded in 2011.

Using comparative analysis to generate new theory and new ideas for policy practice: introducing LARG, WHY and STRIQ

The comparative analysis of gender+ equality policies is at the heart of QUING, and aims at generating new theory, explaining the differences and similarities found. These parts of QUING are named LARG and WHY.

In another part, named STRIQ, the project is further developing theories on intersectionality, on the relationship between gender inequalities and inequalities originating in ethnicity, class, religion or sexuality. As far as policy practice is concerned, this is one of the most urgent needs in the coming years. At this moment, not only the European Union but a growing number of countries state that they intend to address the various inequalities in one set of policy measures. While it is often stated that gender equality policies are the most developed inequality policies, leading to recommendations to build upon these experiences, policy practice is less rational, and shows more evidence of territorial struggles between groups and organisations representing different inequalities.

Under these conditions, understanding gender+ equality policies means to describe and analyse to what extent and how intersectionality is dealt with across Europe. This allows the construction of a conceptual framework on the relationship between gender inequalities and other inequalities, which will be tailored to the needs of policy makers. By the end of 2010, a set of intersectionality reports will be published on this website.

Introducing FRAGEN and OPERA

Additionally, QUING is also preparing the ground for comparative research on the history of feminist ideas in Europe. This part, named FRAGEN, is both modest and ambitious, too. QUING has started with the construction of a database that will ‘open’ selected core feminist texts to researchers by storing original second-wave feminist texts in the database together with an analytic description of these texts in English. For all countries, feminist documentation centres are helping with the selection and extensive coding of texts that have been influential in the development of feminist ideas in their context. The methodology used for this coding runs parallel to the methodology used for the comparative analysis, allowing future links between these two parts of the project. QUING will open this database to the research community in its last year.

In the last two years of its 54 months existence, QUING is very active with its last part, named OPERA, actively translating its knowledge into gender training for all actors in policy making, and it will develop high quality standards for such training, which will be tested in practice.