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Welcome to the homepage of RNGS, the Research Network on Gender Politics
and the State. RNGS is a network of researchers, and represents a long term
research project on women’s movements and the state as well as a series of
future projects that focus on the links among women’s movements and states
through women’s policy agencies. We invite you to peruse our website for
information about RNGS and, perhaps more importantly, for opportunities to
participate in this growing network of researchers working on gender
politics and the state.
The Network and
the Study
Following from an initial collaborative book on women’s policy offices, Comparative
State Feminism, twenty scholars from universities in Western
Europe and North America formed RNGS in 1995 at a conference held at the
University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Since then, the network has grown to
include 38 researchers
from 16 western post industrial countries and 189 associates.
RNGS is coordinated by Dorothy
McBride, Amy G.
Mazur, Joyce
Outshoorn, Joni
Lovenduski, and Marila
Guadagnini. Our purpose is to study late 20th century women's movements
and the way governments have responded to these movements. Specifically, we
want to document and explain instances of state feminism, that is, those
times when institutions inside the state have formed partnerships with
women's movement activists to open up the policy making process to include
women and women's interests. Women's Policy Offices have been established
in most countries and international agencies; RNGS aims to discover just
how effective they have been in aiding movement activists achieve their
goals.
The RNGS study is a multi phased undertaking which uses detailed
analyses of policy debates to compare the impact of women's movements on
five policy issues since the 1970s: job
training, abortion,
political
representation, prostitution,
hot
issue. The first phase is a systematic qualitative
study of women’s movements and women’s policy agencies across the five
different policy areas in 17 different post-industrial countries. There is
a book on
each issue and a capstone book
(in progress) to examine cross-issue patterns and trends. The second
quantitative phase transposes the qualitative data into a numerical
dataset to be analyzed in a capstone article. The dataset suite
is now available on our website.
RNGS researchers also participated in a follow-up study to Comparative
State Feminism that examines state feminism in the contemporary
context. The book on this study, edited by
Joyce Outshoorn and Johanna Kantola, is out in Fall 2007.
Thanks to generous grants from the National
Science Foundation (USA), the European
Science Foundation and other funding agencies – over .75 million in
$/euros – RNGS researchers have met regularly (see network meetings),
with outside consultants, since 1995 to develop a detailed research
design for qualitative phase of the project and a codebook
for the quantitative phase of the project. In June 2005, RNGS held a mini conference
in collaboration with the Institute of
Women’s Policy Research’s 8th Annual International Policy and Research
Conference to present our project findings to policy practitioners. The
complete set of papers may be downloaded, RNGS
IWPR Papers. We also aim to hold a short course workshop on the dataset
at the American Political Science Meetings in 2007.
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