Neoliberalism and gender analysis mainstreaming in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract In this article, I explore the impact of neoliberalism on the gender analysis mainstreaming initiative launched in 1996 by the Ministry of Women's Affairs in the government of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I argue that elements of neoliberal discourse worked against the feminist potential of The Full Picture, the instructional document that was developed by the Ministry to assist policy analysts across government in learning how to use gender analysis in all phases of their work. I also review various strategies for fostering the systematic implementation of gender analysis mainstreaming that have been pursued and argue that none of these has yet proven effective, including proposals to encourage the practice of gender analysis by incorporating measures of its use into the performance management framework established through neoliberal reforms to the public service. Notes Katherine Teghtsoonian is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. The analysis she presents in this article is based on interviews and informal discussions conducted with policy staff in the Ministry of Women's Affairs and in other government departments during the late 1990s, press coverage of the Ministry and its activities, and relevant government documents. She is grateful to all those who generously agreed to discuss their work, and to the administrative and library staff at Women's Affairs. She thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support; the Department of Women's Studies, the Institute for Research on Gender, and the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auckland for institutional support; Colleen Kasting for research assistance; and the participants in Workshop 23 held during the ECPR Joint Sessions at Edinburgh in March/April 2003, as well as the anonymous reviewers for this Journal, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. These figures compare rather unfavourably with the support enjoyed by other departments pursuing a horizontal policy mandate. The Department of the Environment, for example, had a staff of 54 during the period in the late 1980s when Women's Affairs was struggling along with 20. And by 1999 Environment was resourced with 94 full‐time and seven part‐time positions and a budget of approximately 18 million (Environment Citation1999a, 56–9; Environment Citation1999b, 6). Women's Affairs has thus arguably been seriously underfunded, given the broad range of policy areas in which women's interests are implicated. In addition, the Ministry published a checklist targeted at those responsible for decisions regarding health care services in 1989, which was also intended to serve as a resource for women's groups in the community concerned about women's health issues. It was revised and reissued in 1995 following a significant restructuring of the health care system; further updates were not undertaken in the wake of subsequent restructuring (MWA Citation1989, Citation1995). The inclusion of the private‐sector case study on retirement incomes policy, noted above, is one illustration of this. Attention to the relevance of the gender analysis approach for private sector organisations is a theme which is threaded throughout the document. Many people have mistakenly assumed that gender analysis primarily concerns the implementation of equal employment opportunities (EEO) policies in the workplace (ie policies intended to reduce the degree of occupational segregation and other sources of women's disadvantage as employees). The (now‐former) Chief Executive of Women's Affairs has indicated that the absence of any comment regarding occupational segregation as a problem for women in the passage from The Full Picture I discuss here reflected a desire to avoid generating further confusion between the two types of initiative (Lawrence Citation2000). In my view, her explanation and my own discussion, which emphasises instead the text's resonance with neoliberal ideology, do not constitute mutually exclusive accounts. For evidence of the persistence of occupational segregation in Aotearoa/New Zealand see MWA (Citation2002, 31). This discussion is based on interview material as well as on the works cited. Prior to 2000, these overarching goals were articulated as Strategic Result Areas (SRAs), which were identified for the government as a whole for the three‐year period between elections. Since the return to office of a Labour–Alliance government in November 1999, 'Key Government Goals to Guide Public Sector Policy and Performance' and departmental goals contributing to these are identified, instead of SRAs and KRAs, but the general structure of the performance and accountability system within the public service remains intact. Although these measures would not necessarily contribute to positive outcomes for women. Some scholars and bureaucrats have expressed strong reservations about the ability of performance indicators, which tend to be quantitative, and performance management systems more generally to capture the essential features of feminist/progressive work within bureaucratic organisations. See, for example, the views expressed in Eisenstein (Citation1996, 189–94) and Yeatman (Citation1990, 22–3). For example, in Aotearoa/New Zealand itself the Fourth Labour government pursued a number of policies intended to address women's interests during the 1980s (Sawer Citation1996, 17–21) ; elsewhere in the industrialised west parties of the left have tended to be more sympathetic than those of the right toward feminist policy goals (Chappell Citation2002, 63–72; Young Citation2000, 188–91).