Feministizising Policymaking in Practice: How Gender and Politics Scholarship Inspires Government Policy, and Vice Versa

If a Ministry of Equality and Feminisms were created from scratch in the government of your country or region, would you accept leading it? In May 2021, when asked by the just-invested Prime Minister of the Government of Catalonia, I answered, “Yes, I do.” It was a big question, and the task ahead was even bigger, but a close friend helped me kill the vertigo. She said, “Years of gender and politics research, consultancy work, and social activism should do,” while adding that being accorded great leeway to build up a team of social movement activists, feminist academics, and party feminists with experience in executive office was a unique opportunity to bolster feminist change. This combination yielded substantive knowledge of both the priorities of the movements and the political world and, simultaneously, accorded personal ties with politicians and the bureaucratic elite (Mazur and McBride 2007).