The new politics of gender equality pdf

However, a written constitution is not the only place where a commitment to gender equality can be evidenced: key statutes and common laws can provide a similar level of commitment, particularly when backed up by gendered policy machinery to implement and police gender equality.

Equalities ministers at Cabinet level in both the UK and devolved parliaments would be possible, as would a commitment to gender mainstreaming in budgetary processes, public commitment to European and UN objectives on gender equality, and power given to existing bodies such as human rights commissions to hold both national and local government to account for the provision of services which support gender equality.

The Universal Model provides universal, not targeted services. This is crucial in tackling not only gender inequality, but also inequality over the life course between those who work and those who are unable to work due to age either being too young or too old or impairment, illness and disability.

Higher levels of workforce participation amongst women, particularly low-income women addresses the poverty experienced by older women as a result of underemployment over the life course. Gendered outcomes: advantages and drawbacks of the Universal Model. Long-term care services are treated in the same way as the National Health Services NHS and education in the UK: as core parts of a universal, fair welfare state, with clear sharing of risks and benefits.

Formal carers are relatively highly skilled and well paid, there is investment in their skills and training, and they are a highly valued and respected sector of the workforce. Policies join up to be most effective. The Universal Model works effectively to support gender equality because it tackles it on many levels. There is reduced financial pressure on women to undertake high levels of unpaid long-term care due to the lack of tax incentives or support for unpaid carers coupled with universal provision of high-quality long-term care.

Moreover, investment in the provision long-term care means there are many jobs available for women that are highly valued and support their long-term career development. The Partnership Model Countries that fell into the Partnership Model saw gender equality as an important policy driver, but it was not necessarily the main, or even most important, factor underpinning the development of long- term care policies. Partnership model characteristics. The state was seen more as a driver of policy: setting a legislative framework and in some cases providing funding and services, but doing so in partnership with the market, with communities and families, and with individuals.

There was a greater role played by municipal authorities than in the Universal Model, and thus sometimes a greater variation in the availability and quality of services. However, the state did play a strong regulatory role, and individuals did have important rights to access services Table 3.

The provision of long-term care has always been seen as the responsibility of the state to a certain extent in the Partnership Model, and the Netherlands, in particular, has seen relatively high spending in this area. Social rights to long-term care provided by municipalities has been a feature of this model since the mids, but in both of our case study countries underwent substantial revision in the s and again in recent years, reflecting the growing demand for these services from an ageing population.

In long-term care, the state is seen as having an important role, but not being the sole provider of services and support. Instead, support is seen as being funded and delivered in a partnership between the state, employers, the community, families and individuals.

It creates incentives for women, particularly low-income women, to provide care and rewards them for doing so: no family carer is left without an income because she is providing care and support.

Germany The most significant recent change to long-term care policy occurred with the introduction of long-term care insurance.

This is a national scheme that offers benefits based on three levels of need with fixed lump-sum benefits, along with cash payments for carers which can be supplemented by means-tested benefits. The purpose is to enable those who need care and support to purchase their own services from a mix of formal and family carers, using insurance-based state benefits topped up either through their own means or additional benefits.

Moreover, higher income women are more likely to make use of formal publically funded care services creating further social division. However, this does mean that higher skilled women are less likely to take long career breaks meaning that employers are likely to benefit from their re-entry into the workforce, and income inequality across the genders in higher income families is reduced.

Lower-income women are more likely to have a financial incentive to provide care to family members because they can receive payments through the long-term care insurance scheme and through cash benefits directed at them.

The Netherlands Long-term care in the Netherlands has recently undergone substantial change, separating out those with medically-related chronic health problems who are entitled to care within a health funded institution from those with less severe needs who are now eligible for support to help them stay in their own homes and participate in society.

This is coupled with a reduction in eligibility for direct payments for disabled people, which enabled those living at home to employ their own carers including family members. Governance of long-term care policy in the Partnership model: the responsibilities of the state, the market, communities, families and individuals In the Partnership Model, the state acts more as a commissioner than a direct provider of services.

It provides a regulatory framework for the quality of the delivery of long-term care, including regulating who can provide the care and how payments to individuals to purchase care can be spent. It also plays some role in directly providing services at both national and municipal level. However, services are not simply provided through taxation, as in the Universal Model, but through a combination of taxation, insurance, employer and employee contributions.

Compared to the Universal Model, there is a greater role for local and municipal authorities in this model, both in directly providing services and regulating the quality of local market provision. However, eligibility for services and the level of cash benefits is set nationally, not locally, which provides an equitable and uniform level of subsidy regardless of location. The market plays a significant role in providing formal care services in long-term care.

Recent changes to long-term care policy in both Germany and the Netherlands have been specifically designed to allow greater choice for service users and to involve the market in the direct provision of services where appropriate. This is ostensibly a gender-neutral policy move: users are meant to be free to combine formal and informal care provided by the state, the market and family in ways which best meet their needs and circumstances, and in theory this could be from equal numbers of men and women in both the formal and informal sphere.

However, we know that women are hugely overrepresented as carers in both formal and informal long-term care. The reality of a large reliance on the market to provide care effectively means a continuing reliance on the paid and unpaid labour of women and does not address gender inequality in the provision of care.

Moreover, it creates a two-tier care system between higher income women who can afford to supplement formal care through the market, and return to and remain in the labour market, and lower-income women, who cannot afford to supplement insufficient formal provision other than through their own labour, and thus are more likely to work part-time or withdraw from the labour market, increasing their risk of poverty.

Communities also play a more significant role in providing services and support in the Partnership Model than in the Universal Model. Often, the civic society organizations are drawn into the market of providing formal services, and there is sometimes a great reliance on informal social networks to provide low levels of support eg. Families, particularly women, who do not have access to these social networks are at a disadvantage in this model, as they are more likely to have to fill in the gaps themselves or to have to pay for formal support.

Families are perhaps the most important partner in the Partnership Model, and it relies heavily on collaboration between individuals and wider families particularly children in the case of long-term care to take the responsibility both for providing care and support, and for arranging, co-ordinating and integrating with the formal delivery of services.

Cultural preferences for daughters over sons, coupled with a lack of family leave or other incentives to make increased participation in care work attractive financially to men, mean that care work remains gendered. The responsibilities of individuals in the Partnership Model are first to participate in the paid labour market and contribute to the tax and insurance base, which funds the formal provision of services. Second, individuals have a great responsibility to provide some or most of care themselves: in the low- level support of disabled and older relatives, and in the co-ordination and sometimes provision of higher-level long-term care.

The state acts more as a broker of support in partnership with individuals than a direct provider in this model Table 4. Key lessons and non contextspecific policy features of the Partnership model of long-term care 1.

Providing cash benefits directly to service users is fairly simple to do. In fact, cash benefits, tax credits and child care benefits already form a significant part of social policy provision in most developed welfare states, including the UK.

This model could easily be adapted for different governance, legislative and political contexts. Federal and devolved government and municipalities can develop their own versions if they have sufficient tax raising and social policy powers.

A strong centralized social democratic state is not needed to deliver this model, and it can adapt to different political and ideological priorities. Long-term care insurance is widely seen as one of the most important tools in preparing for the growing demand for services in developed welfare states.

Comparing the models for gender equity and context specificity What are the ideas, institutions, and actors that make the Universal Model work? Thelen, Two main ideologies underpin the Universal Model.

The first is that of social citizenship that involves the universal sharing of welfare risks and benefits through state mechanisms.

Services are largely provided directly by the state, although some market and individualized mechanisms for service provision are being introduced in this model. Services are funded through local and national tax contributions. They are not targeted other than a relatively generous dependency threshold or means-tested. This commitment to the idea of universalism also engenders a sense of national solidarity: all citizens work, and all citizens grow old, so all citizens contribute to, and benefit from, the provision of long-term care services.

Article 65 of the Icelandic Constitution guarantees equal treatment before the law and basic human rights regardless of gender. Equal citizenship in the Danish Constitution extends to the right to work, the right to vote, to access education and the right to state assistance to all citizens. These are enshrined in equal opportu- nities legislation since , alongside major welfare reforms that underpinned the current welfare state.

Gendered outcomes: advantages and drawbacks of the Partnership Model. It provides little or no incentive for men unless they It enables people to put together packages of care are relatively low paid to become more involved in and support which reflect their own individual cir- the formal or informal provision of long-term care. The use of the stances but is also universal nationally set and fair.

Because selves, or to be trapped in low paid part-time work services are not homogenous there is the ability to because of the need to combine paid and unpaid deal with variations in demand for and supply of work. This reinforces inequality between different formal services, and to harness local community groups of women.

It also means that lower-income resources to provide support. Because this model relies heavily on inter- Because the market plays a significant role in pro- generational care children providing care for their viding services in this model, there are strong parents as well as intra-generational support incentives to compete on economic rather than between spouses, siblings and friends there is the quality grounds. This usually means that wages are potential for strengthened social networks and kept low and workers are not highly skilled or social capital.

This can lead to emotional as well as valued. Individuals have a significant responsibility to make arrangement for their own long-term care through insurance. Directing subsi- dies at parents rather than providers enables eco- nomic and social policy to be flexible to respond to changes in economic and political circumstance it is far easier to make changes to subsidies and tax benefits than to withdraw funding from largescale publically funded capital infrastructure.

Rather than the state being the main provider and commissioner of services, and therefore having the sole responsibil- ity for protecting against social risks, employers and the market share the risks and benefits with the general population.

There is therefore an incentive for employers to develop family-and-care friendly policies and to support a flexible and well-trained workforce. In the Universal Model, women and gender equality issues were part of the legislature relatively early, and norms of gender equality informed constitutional arrangements and the foundations of the welfare state broadly.

However, this still compares favourably with the UK at 0. The institutions that make the Universal Model work are directly linked to the ideologies that underpin the model.

The first is the nature of the welfare state itself. In all three case study examples Denmark, Iceland and Sweden , the foundations and institutions to deliver comprehensive welfare state services were developed alongside nation-building and constitutional framing of citizenship rights.

Denmark and Sweden similarly laid the institutional basis for both their universal political, civic and social citizenship in the early part of the twentieth century with universal suffrage, gender equality and a state commitment to welfare underpinning it. In the Universal Model, there is a difference between national and local welfare, with national administrations taking responsibility for income provision and municipal authorities for service provision.

This provides important protection for the universality of rights to access long-term care services. It also means that citizens are protected from variations in local fiscal and economic conditions: their rights to long-term care are not necessarily contingent on their economic status or that of their municipality. However, this does not necessarily protect them from variations in the quality of services and the introduction of market mechanisms, and individual care payments may threaten to undermine the universality of services.

Although there is some concern that the introduction of marketization and personalization of care services in a very limited way threatens to undermine this, care workers are highly qualified and relatively well paid in this model.

The first group is elected policy makers: at both a national and municipal level, there has been a political commitment to maintaining the universality of long-term care services over a sustained period of time. Changes to the design of the system — eg. Therefore, any moves to place greater responsibility on family carers are likely to challenge not only political and cultural values, but also the material reality that women are not easily available to provide unpaid care.

However, once needs increase, the tendency is either for formal, paid care in the home, or for older people to move to residential or nursing home care. Eight per cent of Icelandic older people are resident in care homes, compared to 2 per cent of UK older people. Third, the long-term care workforce plays a significant role in ensuring the feasibility of the Universal Model.

At the time of analysis, according to national government figures Iceland, and As discussed previously, the long-term care workforce is relatively highly trained: Danish social care assistants must complete post-secondary training of 8 months and be accredited NOSOSCO, There are no formal requirements for UK social care assistants to be qualified, although post-secondary school vocational training is available.

Disabled and older people who need long-term care services are not necessarily very active actors in the Universal Model. Although they may have contributed towards the funding for services through taxation, only in a relatively small number of cases do they directly employ long-term carers: they usually receive services through municipal agencies, where the level of care and tasks undertaken are decided by the provider, not the user of services.

Therefore, service users have relatively low levels of agency to direct or improve long-term care services directly themselves in the Universal Model Table 5.

What are the ideas, institutions, and actors that make the Partnership Model work? Thelen, Several ideological positions support the Partnership Model. The first is the overarching assumption that the provision of welfare is not solely the responsibility of the state. The second ideological position that underpins this model is the neo-liberal emphasis on the importance of individual choice. Crucially, long-term care policies in the Partnership Model are not based on the assumption that the state OR the family will provide care.

Instead, policies are designed so that individuals and families can choose who provides care. However, this model is also underpinned by an unquestioning acceptance of the overrepresentation of the gendered nature of caring: it is overwhelmingly women and most often low-income women who chose to provide long-term care themselves. The Partnership Model of long-term care relies institutionally on there being a developed market of care providers at a municipal level.

If families cannot choose to have care provided by a high-quality service provider then their choice to provide care themselves is constrained, even if that care is compensated. This model also relies on care work being valued when it is provided for pay: there needs to be a pool of labour willing to engage in care work as a viable career. Care work thus needs to be formalized, with good pay, training and prospects for it to be attractive. Compensation for care work is set at a level that does not encourage men into taking a greater role in parenting or care of older relatives.

It also encourages low paid women to withdraw from the labour market to provide care and increases inequality between low and high-income women. The availability of market alter- natives to family provided long-term care prevents overburdening informal carers. Formal care workers are also supported as part of the labour market. Germany, this model was developed at a time when a pool of labour from the former German Democratic Republic was available, as well as young men seeking to avoid armed services national conscription in the Federal Republic of Germany until , who could opt to work in long-term care services instead.

The Partnership Model of long-term care is also built on strong union support for care workers, and relatively good relationships between unions and the state in negotiating terms, conditions and rates of pay Table 6. Conclusions In contrast to previous approaches to welfare state modelling, the findings here indicate that it is possible to use frameworks derived from gender equality measures to examine the outcomes of long-term care policies.

Both Fraser and Platenga et al. They can be applied to our understanding of the governance of long-term care policies to understand not only how they operate in practice to support or prevent gender equality, but also how context-specific which elements of which policies are: this is vital to understanding how effective such policies might be if transferred to a different context.

Moreover, when this model is threatened by welfare pluralism it can lead to increases rather than decreases in gender inequality. On the other hand, whilst the Partnership Model of long-term care policy might not deliver such marked gender equality outcomes, it is based on a more flexible mixed economy of welfare, and therefore would transfer more easily to other welfare state contexts. Notes on contributors.

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Childcare arrange- ments in Australia, Canada, Finland and Sweden. The Equalities Review, set up to inform a period of intensive institutional change with respect to equalities, has argued that new, more relevant definitions of equality are Women's lives have changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century: reduced fertility and the removal of formal barriers to their participation in education, work and public life are just some examples.

Asking why some politicians succeed in moving into the highest offices of state while others fail, this text examines the relative lack of women, black and working class Members of Parliament, and whether this evident social bias matters Johnson, N. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Kenny, M. This second edition has been not only fully revised, and updated to take account of important recent developments in political thinking, but has also been considerably expanded.

International Feminist Journal of Politics , 7 4 , pp. Rees, T. The Politics of 'Mainstreaming' Gender Equality. Breitenbach et al. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Breitenbach E. Author : E. It gives account of the evolution of gender equality policies and practice at different levels of governance in Britain over the past three decades. Thinking and work around equal opportunities have been fundamentally shaped by changing political conditions. The contributors review past policies and practices before moving on to explore the opportunities and challenges for the future.

During the past decade governments around the globe have introduced institutional mechanisms to promote the advancement of women, including measures to increase women's political participation rates and to incorporate women's interests into policy-making. Why have they done so? How successful have these initiatives been? What are the emerging agendas facing gender equality advocates now? In the New Politics of Gender Equality Judith Squires examines the origins, evolution and key features of three strategies that have been employed across the world in pursuit of gender equality — quotas, policy agencies and gender mainstreaming.

The author critically examines each strategy to see how far they transform political institutions and agendas and to what extent they lead rather to the assimilation of women in male-defined structures. Squires argues that a multi-pronged approach, drawing on democratic rather than technocratic strategies, offers the best potential for advancing gender equality.

She highlights too the limitations of approaches that ignore inequalities among women and the challenges of developing equality initiatives to address multiple and cross-cutting inequalities between groups.

She has written, researched and published widely in the field of gender politics and gender equality. The study of British politics has been reinvigorated in recent years as a generation of new scholars seeks to build-upon a distinct disciplinary heritage while also exploring new empirical territory and finds much support and encouragement from previous generations in forging new grounds in relation to theory and methods.

The central ambition of the Handbook is not just to illustrate both the breadth and depth of scholarship that is to be found within the field. It also seeks to demonstrate the vibrancy and critical self-reflection that has cultivated a much sharper and engaging, and notably less insular, approach to the terrain it seeks to explore and understand.

In this emphasis on critical engagement, disciplinary evolution, and a commitment to shaping rather than re-stating the discipline The Oxford Handbook of British Politics is consciously distinctive.