Trettio år av jämställdhetspolitik
Från kvinnor i arbete till jämställdhetsintegrering
Thirty years of gender equality politicsFrom women?s work to gender mainstreamingThis Bachelor thesis examines how the Swedish state has practiced gender equality as a political project during 1972 until 1999 through the budget bills, using a ?What?s the problem represented to be?? approach aiming to uncover which discourses policies are based on. The method also studies what assumptions underlie policy problems, what is left as unproblematic within the policies and what effects are produced by specific problem representations. A central question for the thesis is what has remained and changed within Swedish gender equality politics. The history of the Swedish welfare state is presented as a background on how gender equality policy has affected the everyday life of women and men. Central concepts for the analyses are: gender equality and gender-power order; rights, resources and interests as three kinds of arguments for gender equality; five categories of arguments for gender equality; and different dimensions of gender segregation. The main results of the study is that the Swedish state during the 1970?s above all used gender equality to achieve full employment through increasing women?s participation in the labour market. During the beginning of the 1980?s gender equality politics was widened to also include e.g. increasing men?s responsibility for children and homework, but mostly focused on efforts to break the gender segregated labour market. In the late 1980?s the state established that women participated in the labour market to the same extent as men, at the same time as a recession within the gender equality project took place which lasted through the first half of the 1990?s. During the second half of the 1990?s the state concentrated on establishing a gender perspective within all areas of politics through gender mainstreaming, which has been the main strategy for gender equality politics since then. The implications of this is that although represented as a catch-all political issue, gender mainstreaming serves as an excuse to depoliticise gender equality as a political field. The budget bills have consistently excluded structural analyses on gender quality, until the late 1990?s when a power perspective took shape right below the surface for the problem representations.