RC 19 on Women, Politics and Policies Gender quotas and mainstreaming: sparring partners in gender equality policies?

Preliminary draft – please do not cite without authors ’ permission Over the last 15 years a growing number of countries adopted statutory gender quotas in order to improve the gender balance in political decision-making. Since the fourth UN World conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 many countries also embraced the strategy of gender mainstreaming. In this paper we argue that gender quotas and gender mainstreaming reflect more than a double trajectory in gender equality policies, one focusing specifically on women and the other targeting a broader audience and a larger set of public policy fields. The two strategies are indeed sparring partners in the promotion of gender equality policies. We are particularly interested in bringing back a discussion on gender relations in politics and, to this aim, we want to (re)assess the quality of gender equality policies such as gender quotas in their capacity to promote a transformation of gender roles. To reinforce the synergy between gender quotas and gender mainstreaming, the former should be built upon a number of quality criteria that have been singled out for mainstreaming. We explore this relationship starting from a number of shifts gender mainstreaming is supposed to spark off in the public (policy making) sphere and analyze to what extent gender quotas have provoked these shifts. Key words Gender equality in politics, gender quotas, gender mainstreaming, quality criteria, gender equality policie