Centers of Gender Excellence - Report of the Evaluation Committee 

Summary and Overview

Introduction:

The committee also noted gaps in Swedish gender research and will indicate in the report some specific suggestions especially regarding the need for better links with scholars and projects within and outside the EU and the Nordic countries (and the Baltic region). To this end suggestions are made with respect to many of the applications where this was seen to be lacking.

We also recommend that those Centers awarded funding be required to disseminate their findings for an international audience and for national discussion. The expectation is that they will push the intellectual boundaries internationally — via papers prepared for international audiences — nationally, and regionally.

An assessment of the work of these Centers after 12-14 months is also recommended so that funding should be awarded for an initial period with follow up funding dependent upon a satisfactory twelve-month report.

Rationale

The committee worked with the definition of gender available to potential applicants in the Swedish Research Council pamphlet on gender, namely that gender is a  ". . .  system that exists in every society. It consists of all the notions of male and female that exists in a certain place at a certain time and all the consequences as regards that does what, who decides what, and how we perceive one another and ourselves, collectively and individually." (P.4) within this framework, biology, and the study of sex differences contribute to, but do not define gender. Looking at sex differences through a gender lens one might ask for example what socio-economic and political forces impact on or shape sex differences or how and why those differences vary.

In intellectual terms we felt that some of the proposals interpreted gender simply to mean the study of women. The Committee agreed that the study of women in institutions or processes was not the same as the study of gender. It also suggests here an extended concept of gender, which we will now outline. Gender implies the study of identities, roles and processes and can indicate too transgender or cross gender processes. It is considerably broader than the categories of female and male and encompasses the study of the impact of the construction and reconstruction of the masculine/feminine upon people´s lives. For example, under the current era of globalization the role of media is crucial in the construction of gender regimes as are transnational economic organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, which interpret gender too narrowly.

Suggestions for the future

In general there was a lack of research proposals that included the re-analysis of existing datasets.  Sweden has a very rich and extensive collection of nationally representative datasets, based on large-scale surveys, and various administrative record systems, many of which provide longitudinal data spanning many years.   These datasets are widely used in some fields, such as epidemiology, producing publications that are at the forefront internationally.  There is potential for many of these high quality datasets to be productively analysed by gender researchers to address important gender-related research questions, by applying a theoretically informed gender-lens to already existing datasets.   

Therefore, the panel recommend that the Centers that have been recommended for funding (as well as other gender researchers in Sweden) seriously consider the ways in which the very rich tradition of Swedish large-scale high quality datasets can be profitably exploited to further research knowledge about gender.

For the future we would encourage these Centers and the Council to address current European and real-time world issues, with gender concerns situated at the center of analysis, such as demographics, falling birth-rates, migrations, preservation and amelioration of welfare states in such conditions, the gender of money and world economics, the gender of war/peace, etc.  By this we do not mean to suggest prioritizing applied over basic research, but rather promoting basic research on questions that might actually make a difference in the future of our world.