Gender & Regulation - Moving Beyond Official Quotas, Leiden, June 28-29, 2012

Organizer: Ekaterina R. Rashkova
Chairs: Ingrid van Biezen & Ekaterina R. Rashkova

The goal of the workshop is to gather leading scholars with interest in gender and politics and encourage research on the connection between gender and regulation. Significant amount of work has been done on the subject of quotas, so our aim is to go beyond quotas alone. We hope to contribute both empirically and theoretically to the study of regulation and its effect on gender representation, gender balanced policies and practices. We are particularly interested in regulation found in party laws, constitutions, electoral laws, and other regulatory documents and how it influences gender equality. We regard the interpretation of regulation more broadly as rules and institutions in general and encourage the study of how those affect gender representation. The papers which will be presented examine an extensive range of issues in various parts of the world, and thus offer a wide and extremely interesting source for the beginning of the examination of the nexus between gender and regulation and its effect on the political development of systems overall.

I. Gender Equality Policy
Section discussant: Joyce Outshoorn (Leiden University)

Papers
Elisabetta Palici di Suni (University of Torino) - Gender Regulation in Italy between Politics and Economics
Tania Verge (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) - Gender Equality in Political Office in Southern Europe: The Cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain
Petra Meier (Universiteit Antwerpen) - Regulating Gender Relations and What They Signify for Symbolic Representation

II. Gender Representation in Comparative Perspective
Section discussant: Ingrid van Biezen (Leiden University)

Papers
Lenita Freidenvall (Stockholm University) - The Swedish Parliament: A Gender Sensitive Workplace
Ekaterina Rashkova (Leiden University) and Emilia Zankina (American University in Bulgaria) - Is it a Man's World? Comparative Analysis of the Effect of Regulation on Gender Representation in the Balkans
Sarah Childs (University of Bristol) - In the Absence of Quotas: Party Regulation and Women's Participation and Representation in British Party Politics

III. Gender Regulation and Diversity
Section discussant: Maria Spirova (Leiden University)

Papers
Karen Celis (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) - Gender Quota Interacting with Ethnic Minority Representation. Parties Regulating Descriptive Representation for Multiple Groups in Belgian Local Elections
Alexandra Dobrowolsky (Saint Mary's University) - Immigration Regulation Changes in Canada: Patchwork Policies and Threadbare Equality?