Gender mainstreaming in Swedish academia: translating policy into practice

Abstract

This article investigates how Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs) conceptualized and organized the 2016 Swedish government directive to gender mainstream their operations. The directive provided the general guidelines for the programme Gender Mainstreaming in Academia (GMA), which was to be implemented by HEIs between 2017 and 2019. This analysis draws on interviews with people at 13 HEIs responsible for, or in other ways participating in, the development of tailor-made gender mainstreaming plans (GMPs), which served as the starting point for the GMA programme. Using organizational translation theory, the article explores how the informants translated gender mainstreaming, as a broad policy strategy, into more specific conceptual and practical terms to fit their local contexts. The analysis focuses on how these gender mainstreaming translation processes were organized and who was invited to participate in the process. The results highlight how the organization of the translation process, the appointment of translators and the local translation of the GMA programme were guided by different principles, most often resulting in an integrationist rather than transformative translation of gender mainstreaming. The limitations and potentials of different translations of gender mainstreaming in relation to achieving organizational change and ultimately a more gender-equal organization are discussed.

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