How Does Federalism Affect Equality Rights Struggles … and How do Such Struggles Affect Federal Arrangements?

This chapter explores three waves of gender-federalism research that began in the 1990’s. The first wave shared feminist political science’s (FPS) quest for the knowledge needed to advance gender equality. Its “normative ambition” (Sawer, 2020) was to expand the political science discipline’s scope by incorporating aspects of the “private” sphere. The second wave started around 2008 and focused mainly on how different federal arrangements affect women who are of each federation’s national majority. A third wave peaked with the publication of a Handbook on Gender, Diversity and Federalism (2020) and a Report on Gender Equality and Federalism (2020) commissioned by the Forum on Federations.