RE-WIRING

In order to prevent and reverse inequalities and promote girls’ and women’sinclusion, 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.