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Abstract
The article discusses equal rights to equal participation and public policies for gender balance in different societal arenas. Although gender balance is a central aim of official Norwegian gender equality politics, male hegemony is the dominant feature in most institutional settings of leadership, power and influence. This inconsistency is rhetorically handled through travel metaphors of gender equality and utility arguments about women's contributions to public life. Gender equality then becomes a question of time, and of how society would profit from “more” gender equality. The rights perspective is distorted. In the final part of the article, we discuss alternative, normative, approaches: gender balance in relation to parity in participation, a distributive norm of simple equality, and principles of non‐discrimination.
Notes
1. For an in depth study of the workings of 40%–60% regulations on the municipal level in Norway, see Guldvik Citation2005.
2. For a detailed analysis of the prevalence of different argumentation types as “grounds for support of gender equality”, on both elite and population levels, see Skjeie & Teigen Citation2003, chapter 10, or Skjeie & Teigen Citation2005. In both publications, we also expand the analysis of utility rhetoric.