On 18 and 19 June, the conference ‘Democracy and Equality under Pressure – Emancipatory Perspectives and Strategies’ took place in Munich. During the workshop sessions, Bernadette Rohlf (research fellow at the TRAWOS Institute) and Monique Ritter (Professor of Gender and Social Work at Landshut University of Applied Sciences and former TRAWOS member) presented findings from their joint research.

The starting point was the marginalised position of women in STEM subjects; in 2019, for instance, women accounted for 18.6 per cent of PhDs in computer science and engineering and just 13.6 per cent of professorships. Paradoxically, measures to support women are often met with resistance from the very women they are intended to help, as they are perceived as an attack on meritocratic principles and the women’s own capabilities. This phenomenon should be viewed in the context of neoliberal anti-feminism, highlighting how women deny feminist achievements and individualise patriarchal structures in order to gain recognition within male-dominated systems.

Around 25 people took part in the workshop and were given an insight into the interview excerpts. During the session, the function of the strategy was described, key definitional points were worked out and alternative approaches were developed. Particularly striking was the tendency of the women interviewed to distance themselves from stereotypical female characteristics and ‘other’ women, and to (unintentionally) reproduce a male norm in their rhetoric. This presents a complex starting point for those working towards gender equality, and raises the question of which approaches and equality measures might prove effective. One suggestion, for example, was to encourage dialogue amongst the isolated women in order to de-individualise their experiences. Furthermore, the use of the term ‘women’s advancement’ should be questioned, as it reinforces a binary and unrealistically one-dimensional view of gender equality measures.