Publications / Articles / 2005 / 2005:101 Political Constructions of Gender Equality: Travelling Towards...a Gender Balanced Society?
Political Constructions of Gender Equality: Travelling Towards...a Gender Balanced Society?
The article discusses equal rights to equal participation and public policies for gender balance in different social 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 persepctive is distorted. In the final part of the article, we discuss the alternative, normative, approaches: gender balance in relation to parity in participation, a distributive norm of simple equality, and principles of non-distribution.