The organisation of the municipalities is based on the principle of representation. It has previously been impossible to give the citizens more influence through direct democracy, but the information technology gives new possibilities and the choice of democracy model might no longer be obvious. Representation can be interpreted in many ways and there is a need for a more distinct definition of the rule that the municipalities shall be governed according to the principle of representation. It should also be further investigated how the new technology can be used to increase the use of direct democracy. The municipalities ought to work to supplement the representation with direct democracy in the form of active discourse with the citizens.

This thesis examines the possibility of Bolivian indigenous women?s social movements? getting their demands of a gender equal society fulfilled in the new state which was initiated in 2005 when Evo Morales became the first president representing the indigenous people of the country. By using a qualitative method I have showed that although the Bolivian indigenous women?s social movements? historically has been significant political actors for social change in the country, with representation at both regional and national level, Bolivian women are still subordinated in the social and political sphere. By applying a feminist intersectional perspective which takes its point of departure in a understanding of power as multidimensional, where gender, ethnicity and class are constitutive principals, multiculturalism theories and a social movements theory framework, I have found that even if institutional changes, that opened the system increased the indigenous women?s social movements political participation in Bolivia, power structures based on gender limited their possibilities to influence both socially and politically.

Caran has a strong belief that women leaders affect the financial profitability positive. Since women leaders are intangible resources it is very difficult to calculate its exact value. The authors found that one of their measurement methods can?t be used to calculate the value of women leaders. The other measurement method can calculate significance between women and men leaders and provides an index to be compared to other groups.

Municipalities with a higher amount of female representatives has been shown to be more gender equal. Earlier reasearch has also shown that female politicians are more likely than male politicans to represent immigrants and refugees interests. However, the effect of female representation has not been tested on other subordinated groups than women. Swedish municipalities have full autonomy regarding refugee reception and local politicians are responsible for the decision on the amount of refugees that the municipality accept. The variations of female and male politicians in the local assemblies are expected to have different outcomes on the refugee reception, according to females social backgrounds and experiences.

Lifestyle magazines portray women in different manners and have an influence on how media consumers create self-images. The importance of knowing how different visual representation of the female acts out in magazines with large target audiences is therefore of weight for the magazines? readers to understand. This thesis analyze how the two lifestyle magazines ELLE and LOVE portrays women in images and how they in turn create ideal images of women.The thesis has been conducted through a qualitative analysis of 5 images from each magazine that represents the magazines artistic styles. The theories used in this study are semiotic image analysis and visual text analysis viewed from a gender- and discourse perspective.The conclusion of this thesis is that ELLE portrays women as strong, happy and feminine, with at tendency towards androgyny, while LOVE describes women as inferior and sexual objects constructed for the male gaze.

This essay casts light on the quantitative aspect of the media representation of foreign news. The purpose of the essay is not only to describe the media representation of the countries of the world, but also to explain the representation out of structures that are mirrored by the mass media. Four hypotheses are stated that are operationalized in the research. These are treating four different factors that are believed to affect the representation, economy, geographical distance, cultural distance and the size of the population. A fifth hypothesis is stating that economy is the most influential of the factors.

The purpose of the essay is to analyze the welfare state from a gender perspective. Further, the paper analyzes and critically examines three different normative solutions provided by Irish Marion Young, Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas for the realization of a welfare state that includes women.Habermas argues that the welfare state has created a situation of dependency and state paternalism which reduces both individual and collective self-determination. Young follows Habermas? argument. She argues for a political climate where justice is reduced to the distribution of material goods rather than the elimination of underlying relations of domination and gender specific patterns.

The purpose of the essay is to analyze the welfare state from a gender perspective. Further, the paper analyzes and critically examines three different normative solutions provided by Irish Marion Young, Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas for the realization of a welfare state that includes women.Habermas argues that the welfare state has created a situation of dependency and state paternalism which reduces both individual and collective self-determination. Young follows Habermas? argument. She argues for a political climate where justice is reduced to the distribution of material goods rather than the elimination of underlying relations of domination and gender specific patterns.

The purpose with this essay is to study if the exhibition, Maria-Drömmen om kvinnan has a gender perspective and if it contributes to the history of art. The study shows what kind of women the exhibition illustrates and what kind of perspective it has. By telling about the black Madonna I also show that there is another representation of the middle age women in the Roman Catholic Church at this time that the exhibition not have included. The study is also going to illustrate the difference between a genderperspektiv in art and a women?s perspective.

Given the possibility that the world, as we know it, is a consequence of human interaction and verbal communication our understanding of the world can be seen as contingent rather than essentially given. Conceptions such as "entrepreneur", "woman" and "man" can then be understood as socially constructed subjects. Departing from poststructural and social constructionist perspectives I will examine medial Representation of Women and men as entrepreneurs. My main purpose is to examine how the entrepreneur is constructed as a discursive subject in the journal Eget Företag. Drawing upon Ernesto Laclau´s and Chantal Mouffe´s Discourse Theory and the poststructuralist feminist theoretical perspective of Judith Butler I will discuss both the construction of the entrepreneur as well as the more explicit question; is gender significant for the construction of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship in Eget Företag? In this study I come to the conclusion that the discourse of entrepreneurship, as well as the journalistic discourse, draws upon discourses of femininity and masculinity but also upon discourses of ethnicity.

The purpose of this essay is to look upon the gender structure in Sweden, during the late Middle Ages. Mainly I focus on how the church viewed men and women, since the material of my research, the miracle stories of three saints, was found credible and was written down by churchmen. The saints, whose miracles I have studied, are Birgitta Birgersdotter and Katarina Ulfsdotter of Vadstena and Niklas Hermansson of Linköping. These miracles have earlier been studied by the historian Anders Fröjmark, who has noticed that there are fewer heeled women than men figuring in the miracles. Because of this, Fröjmark draws the conclusion that women were less able to leave their homes and travel as pilgrims to the holy sites of the saints.

AbstractThe aim of this essay is to analyse the effects of women's representation on actual political outcome. Quantitative method and materials are used to study the consequences of women's political participation in Swedish municipals.Many theorists think that women have special interests, different from men?s, which is also the belief of this essay. This political interest is here defined as freedom from discrimination and violence against women. In order to see if this interest is present in local policy it is transformed into variables concerning whether the local authority has an equality plan, supports a local shelter for abused women and by how much money it supports women's shelter.

This paper examines women's positions in the music industry. By quantitativelyinvestigate ten major companies on the swedish music market, the authors have beenable to mapp positions that are dominated by women and as well as men. The essaydiscusses several theories of both gender in organizations and gender in society inorder to analyze the quantitative results.The aim of the paper is to highlight the current segregation of careers in the musicindustry as well as to lay a foundation for further research on why it is segregated.Clear graphs shows the gender distribution between women and men in business butalso the distribution of gender in occupations / positions in similar companies. In theanalysis the authors reflects on the results using relevant gender theories. In theconclusion, the authors explain the result generated by the analysis and illustrates theprevailing segregation that exists in the music industry.This paper has concluded that a seemingly even distribution between men andwomen in business organisations can sometimes be misleading.

Domestic violence against women is a widespread problem around the world, this study aims to investigate Swedish men?s attitudes towards this problem. To investigate this I have done a historic overview of the political attitude change and I interviewed two ethnic Swedish men and two men with a foreign background, this because to get a fair representation of our multicultural society. The results and conclusions is that the attitude haven?t changed that much over the years, it is mostly the latest decades that politicians and the medial debate have acknowledge the imbalance of power between the genders and that the patriarchy is a major factor towards this attitude.The interviewed showed that the men with foreign background had a tendency to have more traditionally attitude towards women then the Swedish men..

The purpose of this thesis was to examine how women who have committed crimes feel they have been treated by authorities. Our research questions were: How do women who have committed crime feel they have been treated by authorities? How has this treatment affected the women and their life worlds? In our study we have conducted semi-structured interviews with four women who have committed crime. Our theoretical basis has been phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and Hirdmans theory on the gender system. Our main results show that the women have different experiences of treatment, some positive and some negative.