International Studies Compendium Project

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Comment on this article   Feminist scholars have been curious about institutions in at least three ways. First, they have asked how women are situated in organizational spaces within institutions, including whether they are represented on the staff, whether there are special units advancing their concerns, and how their interests are furthered or obstructed in organizational processes. Second, they have studied how institutions encode gender through their rules and discourses, how these rules and discourses produce identities and gendered categories, and how they reproduce patriarchy and domination. Finally, they have explored institutions as sites of contestation over gender, as spaces where social movement demands challenge gender hegemonies, and where commonsensical understandings are codified and thus can be changed (Meyer and Prügl 1999 ). The findings of feminist enquiry in these three areas of research on institutions and gender are summarized here. In keeping with the focus of the compendium, this review of institutions and gender focuses on international institutions. Included are two conceptualizations of such institutions. First is a commonsensical understanding of institutions as organizations, and second is one of institutions as regimes: that is, as sets of rules and discourses (e.g., the development regime or the Washington consensus). Regimes often establish ... log in or subscribe to read full text