Iranian Policy Makers' Conceptions about the Meta-problem of Gender Justice: A Phenomenographic Study

Paying attention to the fate, status and issues of women, who constitute half of the population, is of critical importance. Encapsulated under the term “gender justice”, this subject has received a considerable attention from the government and other policy-making institutions in the form of different gender-based policies regarding distributing opportunities and advantages among citizens. However, as a controversial concept, gender justice has been conceived and used through different and sometimes conflicting lenses in the pertinent public policies, sometimes as an ideal to achieve and sometimes as a problem to resolve. This perplexing status of the term has led to a policy-making bias where the formulation of solutions has taken precedence over the proper understanding and structuring of the situation. As a result, gender justice itself has become a policy meta-problem that needs to be first re-presented, analyzed and finally resolved in order to pave the way for formulating appropriate policies in the field of women. To do so, this phenomenographic study sets out to represent the dimensions and space of the meta-problem based on the analysis of interviews conducted with 21 women-related policy-making experts. Findings show six different formulations of the gender justice and their implications for public policy-making. By interpreting these findings in the light of policy-making literature, this study then provides an agenda to re-solve the meta-problem of gender justice.