The Paradox of Gender Parity: Gender Mainstreaming Turns into Outstreaming

This paper explores a paradox in contemporary climate governance in Northern Europe. Across public climate policy institutions in the Nordic and Baltic countries, we find that gender parity has largely been achieved, and in several cases even surpassed what would be considered parity, with women making up more than 60% of the staff, including at leadership level in traditionally male sectors like energy, thought to embed norms of masculinity making it difficult for women to gain access. Drawing on original data that maps staff composition, 130 climate strategies and policy documents and interviews with civil servants, we show that this institutional ‘femininization’ does not translate into gender-responsive and socially inclusive policies. We discuss potential explanations for this finding by engaging with scholarship on representation. Then we probe further into its paradoxical nature by our analysis of the programs of these institutions. Despite extensive parity, the analyzed strategies remain overwhelmingly gender-blind and even narrowly technocratic. Gender mainstreaming is occasionally mentioned, but typically confined to marginal sections, ‘siloed’ or symbolic language. In line with Alnebratt and Rönnblom’s (2016) notion of ‘outstreaming’, gender equality is effectively ‘organized out’ of the core climate agenda. Interviewees for instance in Denmark, describe gender and gender equality as non-issues, that do not have to be discussed. Engaging scholarship on political representation, feminist institutionalism and climate justice, we show that descriptive representation alone is insufficient in the absence of institutional transformation and epistemic pluralism. The presence of women in climate institutions does not automatically unsettle technocratic norms, economic growth paradigms, or narrow understandings of expertise, of gender and gender mainstreaming. We conclude by rethinking what parity means in climate governance and by arguing for approaches that foreground diverse perspectives and knowledges, fair representation and intersectional climate justice, refuting that numbers alone will deliver transformative change. Keywords: Representation, epistemic pluralism, climate authorities, gender mainstreaming