Archive

Does state support for voluntary organisations curtail creativity and force activists to focus on what the government wants them to?

Gays and lesbians can now marry or register as partners in all the Nordic countries, with the exception of the Faroe Islands. Yet even within the gay movement there has been a long-standing resistance to marriage for same-sex couples.

A dedicated football player, a disciplined martial arts practitioner or a respected weightlifter? According to a recent Norwegian study, young girls are most concerned with their appearance as they become teenagers, but boys must do something to become young men. Their choice of activity is also a choice of masculine identity. 

A book on a shelf at the university bookstore in Lund was the start of a research career for Karin Widerberg, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo.

According to doctors during the interwar period, wide hips made women unsuitable for running long distances. In her recent doctoral thesis, Kerstin Bornholdt looks at how researchers reached conclusions like this.

Young Norwegian women today want to be self-confident, cool and relaxed – as well as pretty and well-dressed. This is the female ideal they find in the magazines they read.

A recent Norwegian report looks at young men from highly patriarchal immigrant families who are struggling with their lives and who have a rather complicated relationship to women.

When a black lesbian is passed by at the workplace, is that a case of discrimination against women? Of gay people? Or because of her race? Or a stereotype that the three elements create in combination? Norwegian researchers Mari Teigen and Liza Reisel are looking into whether legislation can tackle compound discrimination of this sort.

Malaysian IT employees are required to work until 5:30 pm every day, while their Norwegian colleagues often work a flexi-time schedule. So why is it the Norwegians who complain about a time crunch?

Why is killing one’s enemies regarded as more important than raising children? This question was posed by the philosopher “Sophia” as early as the 1700s. “Feminist philosophy didn’t emerge in the 1960s. Questions like these have a long-standing tradition in the field,” says philosopher Tove Pettersen of the University of Oslo.

When traditional Norwegian farming is converted to nature-based agritourism, the gender roles on the farm change. Often the women become the general managers, while the men take over in the kitchen.

According to a new book by Professor Aud Talle, most Somalis who live in Norway have changed their attitude towards female circumcision and are now against the practice.

Despite the increasing awareness about multidimensional discrimination, neither the legislators nor the monitoring agencies are sufficiently well equipped to handle this problem, according to professor of political science Hege Skjeie.

Civil society organizations for ethnic Norwegian women and minority women cooperate very little with each other. This is one of the findings from Cecilie Thun’s ongoing doctoral research project.

Domestic workers are not covered by collective agreements and regulations that pertain to Norwegian working life. As a result, they find themselves in an especially vulnerable situation – partly because many of them work under conditions that protect the employer, not the worker. Could establishing a minimum price be a solution?

Notwithstanding the welfare state, employed mothers in Scandinavia experience just as much conflict between work and family life as mothers in Southern Europe, but the Scandinavian mothers are happier.

When the men’s national team loses a match they are called “sissies”, and women who are good at football “play like men”. Both men and women are the losers when gender stereotypes are used in sports journalism, according to Professor Gerd von der Lippe.

By changing the name to the Committee for Gender Balance in Research, the KIF Committee has received a stricter mandate for its work. “This sends a signal that gender equality involves more than equal rights,” says Mari Teigen, Research Director at the Institute for Social Research (ISF).

Is forced marriage an immigration problem or violence against women and children? According to researcher Anja Bredal, the Norwegian authorities have not totally made up their minds. 

Medical evidence in sexual assault cases may increase the odds of conviction, but the police often fail to use the documentation gathered at sexual assault centres. What determines whether or not the police make use of the evidence available?

Raising small children without stress, good health and a sense of fairness in the marriage – this is the experience of spouses in the 1970s who shared the responsibility of staying at home with the children while working part-time. Sociologist Margunn Bjørnholt has interviewed these couples 30 years later.

In 1959, the Norwegian Parliament ended the practice of establishing lower wage scales for women than for men. “The Norwegian Employers’ Association used deliberate, cynical means to ensure that female-dominated jobs remained low paying. The Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) failed the cause of equal pay by accepting this,” says Professor Inger Bjørnhaug.

Most pregnant women whose foetus is proven to have a genetic abnormality choose to have an abortion, but reaching that decision is a painful, exhausting process for most of them. “The women’s doubt, pain and sorrow make abortion more moral – in the eyes of society as well as her own,” says Sølvi Marie Risøy, a researcher at the University of Bergen.

“I like to give someone a chance. So I have an au pair partly for idealistic reasons.” Norwegian families with au pairs do not agree that they may be exploiting poor women.

Ten years after UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security was adopted by the UN Security Council, the issue of the role of women in war and conflict has achieved a prominent place on the international agenda. Researcher Torunn Tryggestad is concerned that the intense focus on sexual violence weakens the implementation of other crucial aspects of the resolution.

Post-apartheid South Africa: A white professor is accused of sexually harassing a non-white student and loses his job. His daughter is gang raped by a group of black men. Should the novel Disgrace be interpreted as J. M. Coetzee’s protest again the new South Africa, or is the Nobel Laureate saying something else about violence, desire and empathy?

Are gender research and natural science doomed to be on a collision course forever? Absolutely not, according to the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden, where they specialize in gender research at the interface between nature and culture.

Interdisciplinarity – this is a topic that Jorunn Økland could happily talk about for hours. As the new director of the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo, she has recently had an unusual number of opportunities to do just that.

Rape camps, sexual torture and gang rape. In times of war some men become brutal assailants. Many people have asked why this is so. Psychologist Inger Skjelsbæk wants to ask the perpetrators themselves.

Women in academia publish 21 per cent less than their male colleagues, and this figure has been stable for nearly 20 years. A new master’s thesis takes a look behind the numbers.