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Within the last decade, Spain has become a model in legislative policies for gender equality at the international level. However, the economic crisis has led to a growth in inequality, which has revealed the weaknesses of the adopted instruments. Despite the large amount of legislation in this area, the social reality has not changed at all, even experiencing a setback over the past few years. This situation was exposed in our country by a report issued in 2015 by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This report showed the negative effects of the economic crisis and austerity policies on women, even in a context necessitating increased efforts towards women’s rights. Therefore, it is imperative that the concept of gender mainstreaming and the adoption of instruments of “hard law” be revisited. The goal should be to achieve gender justice based on three elements—distribution, identity, and representation—and a real parity democracy.

The Spanish experience of recent years exposes the weaknesses and the challenges in gender equality policies. We can individualize the following objectives for a constitutional system that takes seriously gender equality:

• It is necessary that the principle of parity democracy be constitutionalized 
• The aim of equality does not only have a quantitative dimension: women and men should be equal in the access to power and its exercise, but also that we have to review the status of citizenship itself
• The qualitative dimension of parity democracy needs to ensure not only the presence of women in the exercise of power, but also their ability to influence political decision-making processes
• Parity should be incorporated into constitutional regimes as a principle, that is, as an “optimization mandate”, which should consequently govern the actions of all public branches and, therefore, impact citizenship and relationships between individuals (e.g., in the field of market or labor relations) 
• it is necessary to consolidate a family model and productive relationships in which there is no longer a separation between the roles of the provider and caregiver, so that men and women are “supporters/caregivers in equality”   

The purpose of this manual is to recommend various approaches, actions, and strategies to assist developers in improving gender involvement in hydropower development. This manual is designed primarily to help integrate gender issues as one of the essential components of social considerations, including public involvement strategies, in the EIA/IEE practice. The ultimate goal is to make IEEs and EIAs more effective and thus save the developer time and money.

This manual will help project developers and other stakeholders to achieve the following:

• Promote the concept of integrating gender issues into the EIA/IEE process.

• Help raise local public awareness and encourage public participation for increased

  involvement of local representatives and other local authorities and other community groups4 and local organizations in all phases of project design and development.

• Encourage skills training for local women's groups.

• Encourage and facilitate women's involvement by sensitizing women stakeholders

  groups in decision-making, by enhancing their capabilities to participate actively in all phases of hydropower development of the most vulnerable social groups, especially women, children, unemployed youth, indigenous peoples, social minorities, the disabled, the very poor, etc.

• Encourage the involvement of the women members of the political community, especially among women members of parliament, and local political groups.

• Assist local authorities (DDCs, VDCs) and women representatives of committees, including local consultative forums (LCFs) and compensation fixation committees (CFCs), to be fully involved, informed, and capable of conducting resettlement as well as infrastructure planning, and rehabilitation, and other activities associated with the EIA/IEE implementation of hydropower development. 

The consideration of gender issues in the implementation of hydropower projects is crucial for their sustainability. Hydropower development projects are likely to produce profound environmental consequences. Whether the effects are beneficial or adverse, they will affect the lives of all segments of the population, i.e. women and men of all castes and ethnicity living in the project area. In many cases the effects and benefits of the implementation of hydropower projects are not equitable. The adverse effects of project implementation mainly affect lives of women and the vulnerable castes and ethnic groups, whereas men tend to reap the most of the benefits. Thus, the basic objective of addressing and integrating gender issues into project implementation is to bring equitable distribution of benefits to both sexes and to vulnerable groups. If development is for all, then gender issues must be addressed and their participation should be encouraged when and where possible. 

This article contributes to the growing literature on gender and physics by employing the concept of gendering processes to the study of physics departments in Finland. We show that gendering processes can have paradoxical and ambiguous outcomes for women. In order to understand gendering processes, we analysed two kinds of data: gender equality policies in academic organizations and interview data with 36 physicists, both male and female. On the basis of the interview data we argue that physics departments are gendered in the dimensions of symbols and images, interaction, and mental constructs. We also argue that there are tensions between policies and gendering processes in physics departments because policies do not fully succeed in identifying the processes that maintain inequalities between female and male physicists. The tensions explain why gendering processes have paradoxical and ambiguous outcomes. 

Finland is an interesting national context for studying gender and physics because it enables one to juxtapose gendering processes in fairly well-established equality policies and physics departments, which have low female representation. Despite the gender equality plans, the construction of the ideal worker in physics departments in Finland is surprisingly similar to the construction of the ideal worker in other organizations in other national contexts, reflecting the masculine norm of full- time availability and mobility. We say “surprisingly” also because the culture of physics abounds with attempts to rationalize the norms of long working hours, international mobility, and masculine toughness by appealing to those features that are thought to be specific to physics as an academic field.

The equality plans identify issues that are relevant in light of our interview data such as work-life balance, international mobility, gender-based discrimination, and sexual harassment. In this way, they function as counter-forces to the gendering processes in physics departments. However, the equality plans do not fully succeed in capturing the underlying gendering processes that emerged in our interview data, such as the ideal worker that conforms to the norm of long working hours and the norm of international mobility. While the equality plans give advice about how to deal with discrimination and sexual harassment, they remain silent about the norm of masculinity that is manifested in interactions and mental constructs.  The tensions explain why the equality plans have paradoxical and ambiguous outcomes for women. Instead of challenging the norms of long working hours and international mobility, the plans attempt to tackle the consequences that these norms have for women in academia, such as women’s difficulties in balancing work and family life. Thus, their message is ambiguous. The norms are perceived as problems, and at the same time, women are advised to cope with them.