Men and Masculinities : What have they got to do with gender equality and women’s empowerment?’

When people mention the words, “gender” and “gender equality”, the conversation often soon turns to women and girls. There are both good and bad reasons why this is so. On one hand, women and women’s voices have long been, and continue to be, marginalized and subordinated, especially across various public realms; on the other hand, to limit work, policy development and politics on gender and for gender equality and women’s empowerment as a task only women need to be concerned with may easily let men off the hook, and even suggest that it is women who have to change rather than men. This chapter addresses what might be called the “Man problem” in the promotion of gender equality, in the context of the persistence of gender inequality in society and policy development that impedes the achievement of SDG5 and other SDGs. This concerns both how gender regimes can and do change men, and how men can be and are involved in changing gender regimes (Hearn 2011). In particular, I address challenges in terms of organizing with and by men, and strategies for changing men and masculinities, including transnational approaches. Thus, two sets of interrelations can be recognized: between gender regimes that construct men and masculinities, and men as actors and foci of policy within gender regimes; and between local, national and transnational gender regimes. / ’Regimes of Violence: Theorising and Explaining Variations in the Production of Violence in Welfare State Regimes’. Swedish Research Council, Grant 2017-01914