The gendered leeway: male privilege, internal and external mandates, and gender-equality policy change

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question of why male politicians continue to be relatively unlikely to act in favor of gender-equality policy change, despite the advances in gender equality in recent decades. Drawing together literature on men and masculinities, feminist institutionalism and women’s substantive representation, we present a theoretical argument in which we distinguish between an internal and an external mandate to push for gender-equality policy change. We argue that both these mandates apply to female politicians but not to their male colleagues. As a consequence, a gendered leeway exists: men have more leeway than women in political maneuvering. We illustrate this argument by analyzing high-ranked party representatives within the self-labelled feminist Swedish Social Democratic Party. This article contributes theoretically to the launching of a research agenda on the role of men in processes of gender-equality policy adoption.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender equality
• policy
• men
• masculinities
• substantive representation
• internal mandate
• external mandate
• feminist institutionalism

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Pauline Stoltz, Mieke Verloo, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript. We are also very grateful to Malin Holm and Karolina Lemoine for excellent research assistance. A special thanks to the interviewees, for generously sharing their time, thoughts, and experiences with us. The authors are equal contributors to this article: names are listed in alphabetical order.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This article does not address the much-discussed question of who defines women's interests. For a debate about this issue, see, for instance, Chappell and Hill (2006) and Htun and Weldon (2010).

2 Since the possibility to share parental leave was introduced in 1974, gender-equality actors have demanded that at least a part of the time should be earmarked for the father. The first earmarked month, sometimes called the “daddy month,” was introduced in 1994 by a center-right government. Today, Swedish parental-leave legislation is generous both in terms of time (480 days per child) and reimbursement (80% of the parent's income up to a certain amount). It is also formally constructed in a gender-neutral way, allotting half the time to each parent. In practice, however, it is possible to transfer all but 60 days to one parent. The consequence of this practice is that in 2011, women used 76% of the child allowance days while men used the remaining 24%. In general, leftist parties have been in favor of more individualization, whereas the parties on the right have emphasized the right of parents to decide what suits their families. The question has, however, been debated by all parties.

3 To facilitate a systematic analysis of the interview transcripts we used the software atlas.ti to code the interviews.

4 We have shown elsewhere that the opponents to the reform are more likely to be found in the party leadership (Bergqvist, Bjarnegård, and Zetterberg 2016).

5 By “hegemonic public discourse,” we refer to what politicians and other public figures perceive one can say publically. We thus do not refer to surveys of the public opinion (that may very well deviate from the hegemonic public discourse).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Forte – the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [grant number 2009-1350] – and is part of the project “So far, no further? Gender equality initiatives on the Swedish labor market”.