ABSTRACT
While the concepts of fixing, shrinking, stretching and bending have been defined in the Introduction, and the preceding chapters provided theoretical and empirical perspectives on the discursive construction of gender equality, this chapter deals with the question of how to capture processes underlying these concepts in public policies and what these concepts can mean within the everyday practice of policymaking. It focuses on the detection of processes of fixing, stretching, shrinking and bending in public policies and analyses the possible consequences of such processes. It does so specifically with respect to public policy texts and the amount of consistency – or lack thereof – found in them. The focus is on how the content of public policy documents is shaped in different ways, which allows us to think about the underlying dynamics of inconsistency as a discursive window of opportunity for gender equality policies.
