Gender Mainstreaming Discourse and Transformational Practices: Understanding University Change

Gender mainstreaming is a globalized change strategy that emphasizes the accountability of individual actors to institutionalized norms and the importance of scientific discourses in creating and applying such norms in practice. Gender training is a key means of spreading social change practice in specific organizational settings. This is a “post-structural” strategy which – following Foucault – relies on the distributed power of governance through multiple organizations coordinated textually, conveyed as a mandate of self-governance to individuals and monitored statistically with comparative assessments. For Dorothy Smith, these texts and instruments form the “relations of ruling” in which power is exercised effectively with words rather than physical or economic coercion. The gender mainstreaming approach places great theoretical weight on the power of discourse, but also shares these theorists’ understanding that discourses are not just the words on paper, but ways in which action is coordinated, given meaning and made effective in communicative relationships. This means that translating the politics of mainstreaming into organizations is a contested, local, and relational discursive process. This paper uses the example of the political drive to increase the numbers of women in university-based research and teaching to consider how the mainstreaming mandate is translated into university practices. We compare the variety of European Commission’s Framework Programs FP7 and Horizon 2020 funded gender equality reform projects that focus on structural changes in academic institutions and promote the gender dimension in research to the initiative represented by the US National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program. We compare the formal mainstreaming mandate in Europe with the role of Title IX in the US in relation to how top-down and bottom-up struggles are framed, and highlight the specific communicative practices by which resistance is identified, confronted and perhaps overcome.