| Project Detail |
Dismantling root causes of gender discrimination
Despite years of efforts to eliminate discrimination against women and girls, gender inequalities persist in Europe and worldwide. More work is needed. With this in mind, the EU-funded RE-WIRING project proposed an innovative, multidisciplinary, three-dimensional (institutional, experiential and symbolic) approach, drawing from the disciplinary perspectives of law and governance, social sciences, and gender, media and culture studies. It will enable the identification of root causes of gender hierarchies and aims to ‘re-wire’ political, cultural and economic institutions. The project will bring together several European countries and South Africa in data collecting, study and interventions. RE-WIRING promotes a transformative equality approach and combines many innovative techniques to support equality in all spaces.
In order to prevent and reverse inequalities and promote girls’ and women’s inclusion, representation and empowerment, it is necessary to better understand the root causes of gendered power hierarchies and gender gaps across political, social, economic and cultural spheres.
RE-WIRING’s overall objective is to contribute to practical, sustainable and structural institutional change in these spheres, through evidence-based understanding of cumulative effects of gender stereotyping and multiple forms of discrimination and disadvantages.
The project therefore involves extensive research in six countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, Poland and the UK and collaboration with a variety of stakeholders. The project team will carry out a survey and interventions, in addition to qualitative data collection, media discourse analysis and legal policy analysis. RE-WIRING incorporates innovative responses to the challenge to properly identify how the interrelations of power and barriers shape gender (in)equality and exclusion within the different spheres and how these can be effectively changed.
It does so, first, by developing an approach that combines insights from the institutional, experiential and symbolic levels of gender (in)equality in the fields of decision-making, law and policies, work, education and media. This will provide the basis for a much needed multidisciplinary Transformative Equality Approach. This approach will also add to the state-of -the-art by taking intersectionality, culture and crises into account as relevant contextual factors for making such an approach work. Second, the analysis combines various research techniques geared towards co-creating practical solutions, innovative tools and policy responses for the effective mainstreaming of transformative equality in public and private institutions. The project thus aims to ‘re-wire’ institutions so as to dismantle the structural root causes of gendered power hierarchies |
