By Daing S. Nasir
Priscilla Lambert, assistant professor of political science at Western Michigan University, has been awarded a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation for a for a project entitled “Gender and Constitutions: A Comparative Analysis of the Effect of Gender Provisions.”
Lambert will be conducting the project with Druscilla Scribner, assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
Lambert and Scribner will conduct a statistical analysis of gender provisions in 100 countries in national constitutions and their effects on women’s political, economic and social standing. They will also perform a more in-depth analysis of provisions, laws and their enforcement in 15 countries in five world regions as well as a close qualitative analysis of six key countries in southern Africa and South America. The grant totals $312,000 over a period of three years.
In the study, Lambert asks if the “gendering” of constitutions promotes women’s equality.
“New democracies, and some older ones, increasingly include gender provisions in their constitutions,” Lambert said. “This research examines the incorporation of gender in national constitutions and the significance of this trend for women’s equality.
“Constitutional choices about gender rights reflect opposing perspectives about whether and how gender differences should be recognized in law,” she continued. “Gender and law scholars disagree whether women, and the movements that represent them, should pursue a rights strategy based on their equality with men or if they should accept and embrace their differences with men and pursue policies that make allowances for women’s differences.”
The research will evaluate these strategies comparatively, tracing the impact of different types of gender provisions on women’s political and economic status across countries, and analyzes the conditions under which constitutional provisions are likely to shape the content of laws and regulations that in turn affect women’s well being and equality.
“Women make different choices and bring different strengths and perspectives to any decision-making process, whether it be in the family, the polity, or the economy,” Labert said. “Moreover, many social problems are closely related to women’s lower political, social and economic status.”
The research plans to contribute to theories of social policy and gender equality, constitutional design and performance, legal mobilization, and law and social change.
“We hope to both further the comparative research on constitutions and law as well as gender studies,” Lambert said. “The outcome of this research may help us better understand how gender provisions and laws can shape outcomes and their usefulness for groups seeking to advance women’s equality.”
Dissemination of the results of this research has the potential to inform and shape the strategies of women’s advocacy groups, both domestic and international.
The project requires student research assistants and would expose students to quantitative and qualitative research methods in political science, legal studies and women’s studies.
The project will also provide a searchable, web-based dataset of gender provisions in some 100 national constitutions.
“The research involves multiple countries and taps into the expertise and experiences of national and international networks of non-governmental organizations, scholars and government officials,” Lambert said.
“In doing so, the project has the potential to draw members of the scholarly community and women’s advocacy networks closer together and to disseminate information about their regional experiences and strategies.”
