Has mainstreaming gender in research policy increased research with a gender perspective?

Abstract Gender mainstreaming was chosen as a major strategy for the promotion of gender equality in the Beijing Platform for Action in 2002. This approach has been adopted in research policy in many countries, including Norway. We ask: Has the share of published research that includes sex and/or gender perspectives increased during the last decade in Norway? And, during the same period, has the female project manager share and female author share increased? We harvested all the research publications written in English or Norwegian, having at least one author with a Norwegian affiliation and being published in 2011 or later from the Norwegian research publication database and institutional academic repositories. The publications were filtered on a predefined lexicon using a keyword-in-context-analysis followed by manual filtering to identify publications with a sex and/or gender perspective. The resulting dataset of 4,548 publications was supplemented by a second dataset containing the funding status and gender composition of all the research project proposals submitted to the Research Council of Norway during the same period. No change is identified in the share of publications with a sex and/or gender perspective over the period. During the same period, we also find that the female project manager share and the female author share, are both unaltered. The applied theory suggests that high levels of ambiguity and conflict imply symbolic policy implementation. We conclude that attempts at instituting gender mainstreaming in research policy do not seem to have impacted the share of research with a sex and/or gender perspective in Norway.