Introduction

As the editors of this volume have already noted, the equality mantra in Sweden has led the Swedish government to produce policies that grant women and men certain opportunities related to, for example, work–life balance and childcare provision, and so on. At the same time, the realities of the ‘equality situation’ are messy and often quite difficult to pinpoint and conceptualise. An important part of the gender-equality discourse in Sweden is the desire for a gender-equal labour market. However, one of the great conundrums related to work life is that although women take part in paid work to nearly the same extent as men (SCB, 2014; SOU, 2014b), women's sick-leave rates are much higher than those of men (Angelov et al, 2011; SCB, 2014; SOU, 2014a). This has been framed as one of the big problems in terms of public spending (Michailakis, 2008; Olofsdotter Stensöta, 2009a; Johnson, 2010) and the organisation of work in and the recruitment of personnel to the welfare sector, because women are often found in care work (Arbetsmiljöverket, 2014b).

In this chapter, we draw on empirical work from a government project aimed at changing this pattern. This was a project that came to harbour a lot of hope for change. While researching this project, we became increasingly interested in unfolding the meanings of these hopes. The aim of our chapter is to explore what promises genderequality work – commonly conceptualised as gender mainstreaming – makes to the governance of ‘gender equality’, regarded as a ‘national treasure’. In our research during the project we continually met participants who asked for advice on how to perform gender-equality work in the ‘right way’ and often expected us to deliver answers. We therefore found that the promises of gender mainstreaming seemed to stick to us as gender scholars in particular ways. As we got caught up in the fantasy of Swedish gender equality, we also needed to explore what this stickiness of gender-equality politics might mean for presenting a feminist critique of how gender mainstreaming is done. The persistent posing of questions about how to perform gender-equality work and the question ‘What should we do instead?’ in this chapter are our analytical entry point for exploring what the promises of gender mainstreaming do.