Designing robust and revisable policies for gender equality: lessons from the Australian construction industry
By Natalie R Galea, Abigail Powell, Martin Loosemore, L. Chappell. 2015
113 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The construction industry remains the most male dominated sector in Australia. Several decades of formal gender equality initiatives by government and business have failed to bring about any meaningful change to the hierarchical and numerical representation of women in the sector. Drawing on new institutionalism, particularly the concepts of ‘robustness’ and ‘revisability’, the nature and intent of formal policies and programs that impact on gender equality are analysed in two large Australian multinational construction firms. Through in-depth interviews with senior management and a document analysis of formal policies, it is concluded that gender equality initiatives and broader policies are primarily focused on increasing the numbers of women in construction rather than addressing gender practices and outcomes. These policies lack many of the qualities of robustness and revisability, which impacts on their capacity to genuinely challenge the gendered norms, practices and narratives of the sector.
Subfields: Gender Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b1dd8703cc0d1578ab7ebc57b4387c2d737fd5c
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In Gender Studies
Citations in the corpus
- Resilience and robustness in policy design: a critical appraisal (2017, background): “In contrast to resilience’s focus on returning to an equilibrium point, robustness has been associated with the maintenance of ‘policy strength’ and the resistance of a society and its institutions to change (Lowndes and Roberts 2013; Galea et al. 2015).”