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‘Gender competence’: Germany 151 managing diversity. Gender mainstreaming is a concept that is open to dif erent interpretations. According to the widely quoted dei nition of the Council of Europe, gender mainstreaming is ‘the reorganisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policy-making’ Council of Europe 1998: 15. According to this dei nition, gender mainstreaming is understood as a cross-sectional task. It has i a personnel dimension – all members of an organisation are involved, ii a thematic dimension – all programmes and decisions have to be checked with respect to gender equality, and iii a formal dimension – all levels of an organisation’s hierarchy are involved. The complexity of the area of responsibility and the inclusion of poten- tially all members of an organisation account for why gender politics tends to become professionalised under the auspices of gender mainstreaming. There is a growing demand for gender competence on the side of the organisations, so that it is economically worthwhile to develop and to of er a specii c gender expertise. The responsible actors within the organisations – and these are not only the women’s representatives – are usually not equipped with the knowledge that is necessary to start gender mainstream- ing processes ef ectively. This circumstance and the political pressure to implement gender mainstreaming have led to a growing demand for gender expertise Bock et al. 2004: 248; Schambach and von Bargen 2004: 283. GENDER EXPERTISE Gender mainstreaming and managing diversity have created a new market, and those who of er their services on this market try to professionalise their expertise. A new professional proi le is emerging: the gender expert. The shape and the course of this process are well known from research in other i elds of professionalised work, where we can observe the i rst steps of an academic approach to knowledge transfer as well as initiatives to found a professional association. In 2004, a professional association for gender training and gender counselling was founded in Germany. Established professional associations of education and counselling are aiming to inte- grate the gender issue into their professional activities, for example the German Association for Supervision or the German Association of Adult Education. The Professional Association of German Sociologists has also taken up the gender issue. 1 Various institutions are involved in the academic approach to knowl- edge transfer. The most prominent German institution is the Gender 152 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work Competence Center at Berlin’s Humboldt University. The Free University of Berlin has also established a course in gender competence. The Center of Social Research in Dortmund has founded a Gender Academy. The University of Applied Sciences in Kiel of ers ‘custom-made programmes of qualifying and training for the implementation of gender mainstream- ing’; 2 on completing the course, the students receive a ‘Gender Expert’ certii cate. 3 There are similar academic approaches in other countries. The Tyrolian University of Applied Sciences in Kufstein, for example, of ers ‘gender competence training’. The University of Applied Sciences in Solothurn, Switzerland, of ers a gender management course. Not only academic institutions, but also other organisations are trying not only to meet the demand for gender knowledge, but also to stimulate it: political foundations and, interestingly, various counsulting i rms. The kind of gender knowledge that is taught varies from institution to institution. I shall return to this point. With regard to the relationship between gender and profession, there is a further issue that reminds us of processes of professionalisation in other i elds. With the growing professionalisation of gender politics, the i eld becomes attractive to men. This is similar to the professionalisation of social work, for example. 4 Professionalisation changes the gender relation in favour of men even in the i eld of gender politics, which until now has been occupied almost exclusively by women. GENDER COMPETENCE The new leading concept in gender politics is ‘gender competence’. The term itself is generally accepted. But what gender competence means, what it consists of, is an issue that is widely contested. Within this struggle, the women’s movement and female politicians engaged in women’s politics are only two stakeholders among several competing groups of actors. The dei nitions of gender competence oscillate between two poles: political and economic. At one extreme, gender competence is dei ned in the tradition of political feminism, that is, i nding ways and means for eliminating the per- sisting inequalities between women and men. At the other, it is character- ised by a dominance of economic arguments and reasons; the dif erences between women and men are not so much described in terms of social inequality, as understood as a resource of organisational development. To outline the political dei nition I refer to the paper by Sigrid Metz-Göckel and Christine Rolof 2002: 8, ‘Gender competence as a key qualii cation’. Based on a dei nition of gender as a structural category in social analysis, gender competence is understood as the ‘knowledge neces- sary to recognise social determinations in the behaviour and the attitudes