Quality in Gender+ Equality Policies European Commission Sixth Framework Programme Integrated Project

This State of the Art report is part of the comparative research project QUING that is financed by the European Commission. QUING will answer two important questions: What are actually gender equality policies in the practice of national and European policy making? And also: What is the quality of these current policies, especially in terms of their transformative potential, their attention for other inequalities and their openness for voices of the movements that lay at its origin? QUING studies all 27 EU-countries plus Croatia and Turkey. QUING will present results from January 2009 on, and will be finished in 2011. For its analysis, QUING has chosen three gender equality relevant issues: non-employment, intimate citizenship and gender based violence. The comparative study will enable a better understanding of differences and similarities, and of the quality of gender+ equality policies. This comparative analysis is the heart of QUING that will generate new theory, that will be relevant to the whole of Europe. These parts of QUING are named LARG and WHY. In a related part, named STRIQ, the project will further develop theories on intersectionality, on the relationship between gender inequalities and inequalities originating in ethnicity, class, religion or sexuality, and describe and analyze to what extent and how intersectionality is incorporated in gender equality policies with across Europe. Additionally, QUING will also be preparing the ground for comparative research on the history of feminist ideas in Europe. In this part, named FRAGEN, QUING will start with the construction of a database that will 'open' selected core feminist texts to researchers by storing original second wave feminist texts in the database together with an analytic description of these texts in English. QUING will open this database to the research community in its last year. In its last two years, QUING will also be very active with its fifth part, named OPERA, actively translating its knowledge in gender training for all actors in policy making, and it will develop high quality standards for such training, that will be tested in practice. For a more extensive presentation of the QUING project please consult the website at www.quing.eu. This State of the Art report has the goal of assuring that the QUING researchers start their research using the knowledge that is already available on gender equality policies in a country. In this sense, the State of the Art is a classic literature review, relevant to …