Legislating for political gender quotas in Ireland

In July 2012, legislation on political party funding and candidate gender quotas was enacted by the Irish Parliament. The Electoral (Amendment) (Political Funding) Act 2012 provides for a 30% gender quota for party candidates at the next general election, rising to 40% seven years thereafter. Non-compliant parties will lose half of their annual state funding. Informed by insights from feminist institutionalism, this paper will consider the question: why did Irish political parties, who have always been so reluctant to tackle the question of women’s under-representation, suddenly do a volte-face and introduce such a radical measure as legislative gender quotas? In answering this question, we argue that the political reform discourse that emerged following the recent Irish economic crisis was a significant factor in the adoption of legislative gender quotas in the Republic of Ireland. It signified, and made visible, the divergence between politicians and the public on the issue in a context where political representatives were under question, and political institutions being criticised, for ineffective political management. We contend that Ireland is an example of how apparently enduring and immutable gender norms can be overcome. We suggest that feminist institutionalism enables an unpacking of the messy complexities of institutional resistance to change and reveals the power of informal institutions to shape outcomes leading to a major formal rule change.

Can Consent Training End Sexual Violence On Campus?: Students, Consent and Sexual Ethics

The ongoing, potentially worsening problem of sexual violence and harassment on university campuses has emerged in the last few years as an area of concern. Female students have been identified as one of the most likely groups to experience sexual violence and this violence is exacerbated by contemporary student cultures around alcohol consumption and gendered and sexual norms. University campuses have also become central to prevention efforts in many countries due to their relatively accessible populations and an ability to implement social policies at an institutional level.
Many of these measures are based around promoting or educating students about sexual consent, and particularly notions of affirmative consent, expressed as ‘Yes means Yes’. However, there exists little research around sexual ethics with students exploring whether consent is in fact the best way to tackle cultural problems of sexual violence on campus. This paper makes use of existing literature on sexual ethics and focus group research undertaken with Australian university students to argue for an approach to the problem of sexual ethics on campus that is broader than simply focusing on training programs in sexual consent. It identifies a number of limitations to the consent framework and argues that prevention efforts need to more seriously engage with broader cultural norms around heterosexuality and gendered relationships.

Unmasking the ‘Elderly Mystique’: why it is time to make the personal political in ageing research

This article uses feminist scholarship to investigate ‘the elderly mystique’ – which contends that the potential of old age is masked by a set of false beliefs about ageing (i.e. ageism) which permeate social, economic and political life (Cohen, 1988).
The article presents a theoretical model which explores the extent to which institutionalised ageism shapes the trajectory of life after 60. The hypothesis under-pinning the model is simple: The challenge for ageing societies is not the average age of a given population but, rather, how age is used to structure economic, social and political life. An inter-disciplinary framework is used to examine how biological facts about ageing are used to segregate older from younger people, giving older people the status of “other”; economically through retirement, politically through assumptions about ‘the grey vote’ and socially through ageist stereotyping in the media and through denial and ridicule of the sexuality of older people. Each domain is informed by the achievements of feminist theory and research on sexism and how its successes and failures can inform critical investigations of ageism.
The paper recognises the role of ageism in de-politicising the lived experience of ageing. The paper concludes that feminist scholarship, particularly work by feminists in their seventies, eighties and nineties has much to offer in terms of re-framing gerontology as an emancipatory project for current and future cohorts of older people.

Bringing Women In: Global strategies for gender parity in political representation

this article discusses the three main strategies employed across the globe to raise the levels of women's political representation