Obeying organisational 'rules of relevance': gender analysis of policy

Abstract

Introduction: Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi There is considerable research showing that organisations, including government agencies and the policies they produce, consider gender irrelevant to their core business. The gender mainstreaming of policy is designed to challenge such an assumption, using the argument that mainstreaming gender can ‘transform’ the ubiquity of genderblind policies. Various countries, as this book (among others) shows, have developed particular methods and tool kits for transforming the outcomes of their policies, in order that those policies take seriously the relevance of gender. This chapter underscores the question of gender (ir)relevance, and how it is produced by complex organisational practices. It turns to feminist organisational theory to analyse the institutionalised practices that construct and organise policy priorities (see Chapter 6). In agreement with Benschop and Verloo (2006), we argue that effective gender mainstreaming cannot be achieved without attention to the specific organisational sites in which policy is developed and implemented. The chapter draws on the ‘turn to practice’ in organisational studies, and feminist strategies of ‘sudden seeing’, to consider what our insights from the gender analysis study might offer future interventionist projects. Western Australia furnishes most of the examples used in the chapter, although general descriptions of the project’s aims and challenges apply also to South Australia. The starting point for the chapter is our finding in Western Australia that it was only through doing the gender analysis in their organisational contexts that policy actors came to see the relevance of gender to policy.