Since Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microloansorganization Grameen Bank, was awardedthe Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the microloansorganization has received much attention. Thewoman has come to play a central role in the microloansorganizations. Her access to capital isis considered to improve her socioeconomic status. The overall aim of the paper is to examinehow access to microcredit considered leading to empowerment of women. To get an idea ofwhat a microloansorganization is the Grameen Bank is used as an example.

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.

The aim of this thesis is to discuss and analyse the media debate about feminist self-defence, by pointing out the pros and the cons. The arguments in favour could be separated into three different parts: statistical arguments, psychological arguments and justice arguments. The counter arguments could also be separated into three parts: general arguments, violence-related arguments and gender-related arguments. In short, feminist self-defence is built on women's experiences of men's violence. It contains three different parts to help women avoid violence, threat of violence, insult and sexual harassment.

In this thesis we have tried to answer the question of whether or not the peaceorganizations working in Israel and Palestine have an impact. We have answered the question by analyzing six different organizations; three who work with children and the other three with women issues. The analysis contains a case study of each organization and then a comparison between the two groups. This study is built on theories about; grassroots organizations, women in organizations and intergroup communication. Our conclusions in this thesis show that there are some similarities between the groups as well as there are differences.

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.

This thesis is using the theory of participatory democracy to show how one can work to increase the participation in the society, between elections as well as during elections. For a couple of years now many traditional democratic countries have been struggling with low voting rates. Hence this, I find it interesting to study what has been done to cope with this problem. The government in Sweden had a project working on how to make more people involved in the democratic process, especially people that to a lesser extent participate in this process. In this thesis two projects will be studied, Möllevångsgruppen and Unga väljer Miljö i Malmö.

In this thesis I discuss how the western conception of reason is an aspect of power. I consider the western comprehension of rationality to be a masculine and ethnocentric understanding, though by itself acclaimed to be universal. My purpose with this thesis is to analyze how this western and masculine conceptualisation of reason follows a gramscian structure of power, which makes it reproduce itself in the postcolonial project of science.The theory of hegemony and ideology of Antonio Gramsci is central for analyzing the reproduction of the western subject of knowledge. The theoretical approach is also based on the understanding of the Other as essential for defining the identity of the self. My two main objects of study is one text of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which discuss the problems of representation, and one of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in which she examines the tendency to neocolonization in certain western postcolonial feminist research.

In October 2006 the media began investigating the four ministers Billström, Borg, Borelius and Stegö Chilò who were all being accused of miner tax fraud. The two women, Stegö Chilò and Borelius became the primary victims of an extensive media hunt where the media already had made their minds up; the women had to go. The more the women tried to explain themselves, they only seemed to be digging themselves into a deeper hole and ten days into the ?hunt?, the media got their way, the women resigned while the men, even today remain on their positions. What was it then that made the outcome so different regarding the four ministers when the only thing to really set them apart was their genders?With support of theories from Giddens, Habermas and Thompson as well as theories regarding media, gender and the medias ethical responsibility we have in a qualitatively narrative analysis studied 20 articles from Dagens Nyheter and Expressen.

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.

This thesis explores how the Swedish magazine Morgonbris depicted women's new roles in the workforce during World War I and whether these depictions challenged or upheld contemporary gender structures. The study addresses two main questions, how Morgonbris portrayed women's new roles in the workforce and how this portrayal challenged or upheld contemporary gender structures. And also how the magazine integrated the ideal of respectability to engage and mobilize female workers, analyzed through Ronny Ambj?rnsson's descriptions of respectability ideals. Using Hirdman's gender system theory, which examines the maintenance of gender power structures through separation and hierarchy, and Ambj?rnsson's work on respectability ideals, the study employs a qualitative content analysis of articles from Morgonbris during the war years. By identifying and analyzing expressions of class and respectability ideals, the research uncovers strategies used to engage and mobilize female workers. The results show that Morgonbris portrayed women's entry into traditionally male-dominated labor sectors as a significant shift that challenged established gender roles.

The purpose was to look into the pattern of consumption among middleage women. Our questions were how women experienced the need to consume, how they defined the expression of consumption and if there was a difference between "shopping" and "buying". The research has been done through eight qualitative interviews and searching in litterature, illuminating our questions.All women defined consumption as satisfying basic needs. According to them everything bought on a daily bases is consumption. More difficult to define was the experience of "need".

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.

In the rural districts of Sweden, especially in Skåne, the political party Sverigedemokraterna is gaining more and more territory. The aim of this thesis is to examine if the presence of Sverigedemokraterna has had an effect on the other political parties in Kävlinge and Svedala municipality, with focus on images and collective identity. The aim is also to examine what influence Sverigedemokraterna might have on the political agenda of the two municipalities. In order to be able to fulfil the purpose of the essay, we chose to combine three kinds of qualitative methods; interviews, observations and literature studies. We used theories about images and collective identity to examine in which way the municipal politicians tend to classify Sverigedemokraterna in terms of different images and if their presence has effected the other politicians in terms of forming a collective identity.

Every now and then new political ideas appear which creates debate. A current example of political debate is the one which concerns the creation of a feminist political party in Sweden -Feministiskt initiativ. Apparent in the current debate is that there are two existing conflicts of ideas present. The liberal thought of politics of ideas stands against feminism's demand for presence in the political life. And the other, the conflict which concerns the question of where a line between the public and the private spheres should be drawn.