How Are Political Institutions Gendered?

Abstract

Understanding the role of institutions can help explain why gender equality policies often fail and why the efforts of gender equality advocates are frequently frustrated. Focusing on micro-foundations and using cases from comparative politics, the article builds a model that specifies the mechanisms whereby political institutions are systematically gendered. Political opportunities and outcomes are shaped not only by rules ‘about gender’ but also by seemingly neutral rules that have ‘gendered effects’, due to their interaction with institutions outside the realm of formal politics. Rules shape behaviour in gendered ways through mechanisms of regulation, obligation and persuasion. Actors reproduce gendered institutions through enacting rules, but they also generate change through adapting, resisting or reforming them. The article specifies concepts and methods for researching how political institutions are gendered within and across political systems. It also identifies points of intervention for those seeking to build more gender-just political institutions.

The gendered dimensions of informal institutions in the Australian construction industry

“…Lowndes (2014, p. 687) notes that rules distribute power by assigning particular roles including the opportunity to make, break and shape informal rules to particular individuals. As she has argued most recently: ‘[a]ctors reproduce rules as they use them, thus generating the regularities and stability associated with institutions’ (Lowndes, 2019, p. 15). We observed this phenomenon across recruitment, retention and progression, where we saw evidence that senior managers and line managers (i.e., those who hold power and who are invariably men) can influence the practices that are enforced and the practices that are ignored.…”

“…Building on work in feminist institutionalism and addressing the lack of application of this theory in the field of construction management, this research investigates the gendered nature of informal rules in construction, including how they obstruct gender equity in construction. In doing so, this article makes an important contribution to the feminist institutionalist literature, which until now has been limited in its focus on the political arena (Krook and Mackay, 2011; Lowndes, 2019) and in studies of the ‘global north’. While this article does not broaden the geographic scope of this conceptual approach, it does test the applicability of key concepts within an entirely different industry sector, and demonstrates the broader value of feminist institutionalism for interrogating and exposing gendered practices and outcomes.…”

“…We also adopt a rapid ethnographic approach, recognizing that access to the often ‘taken for granted’ is hard to collect from interviews and survey data alone. Empirically, our study operationalizes the feminist institutional (FI) concepts of gender rules, rules about gender and the role of gendered actors (discussed further below) and, in doing so, tests how far these concepts ‘travel’ outside the political sphere where they have predominantly been used to date (e.g., Krook and Mackay, 2011; Lowndes, 2019), guiding the way for others to apply this theory to a much broader range of cases, including other industries. Theoretically, the FI lens allows us to go beyond most existing research on women in male‐dominated fields, much of which pays attention to either formal rules, such as flexible work practices, parental leave and so forth, and/or the impact of organizational culture on women (e.g., Dainty & Lingard, 2006; French & Strachan, 2013; Lingard & Francis, 2004, 2007; Watts, 2009; Wright, 2016).…”

“…Institutions are rules that embed stable reoccurring patterns of behaviour that operate with a twofold effect in our workplace and society: they prescribe and proscribe which behaviours are acceptable and which are not (March & Olsen, 1984, p. 747). As such, institutions are different to organizations, the latter being the ‘arena of action’ in which institutions operate (Lowndes, 2019). Institutions can be both ‘ formal ’ (e.g., codes of conduct, contracts, procedures, policies, laws) and ‘ informal ’ (e.g., norms, practices and narratives) (Lowndes & Roberts, 2013; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991).…”

Towards an adventurous institutional politics: The prefigurative ‘as if’ and the reposing of what’s real

“… 2. For a useful account of the gendered character of institutions that focuses on rules, see Lowndes (2019). …”