Who is actually addressed in gender equality policies? Why are lesbian women not a targeted group in labor participation policies? And why are in effect migrant women being targeted in policies that aim to improve the situation of so-called kansarmen (‘people with few chances’; Dutch policy term)? In this paper we aim to look at the implicit logics of category making. What discourses on inequality - including versions of in- and exclusion - are being constructed or reproduced in current gender equality policies? To what extent and how do they represent identity politics? More specifically, from an intersectionality perspective, we focus on how different axes of inequality (like race/ethnicity, class, and age) are represented as interrelated in the prognosis and diagnosis of policy issues in the form of categorizations. According to Charles Tilly (Durable Inequality 1998), states hardly ever escape creating inequality through category making, not even when the whole purpose of some of their policies are to work against inequality. Gender equality policies in Europe are a prime example of policies through which states and state like institutions attempt to reduce or counteract inequality. This paper will analyze these policies on how they categorize on gender and on other social and political ‘boundaries’ at the same time. What is the extent of such intra-categorizing? And what are the other social and political boundaries that are drawn? Does the extent or the character of the categorization vary across issues? Does it vary across states? Does it vary across type of public policy text (such as laws or policy reports)? The paper will use data that have been brought together in the context of the QUING project, an integrated project financed under the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission that compares the EU member state countries and candidate country Turkey and Croatia on the following policy fields: general gender equality, non-employment, intimate citizenship, and gender-based violence.
