Kvinnorna och EU:s informella institution - En kartläggande studie med samtalsintervjuer om kvinnors erfarenheter i den Europeiska Unionen

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper is to examine if informal situations that occur in the European Union affect women inside the organization. Inspired by Sarai B. Aharoni’s study on informal situations in peace negotiations, I have interviewed Italian and Swedish women who work or have worked, either in the European Union or in close relationship to it, with the purpose of starting a mapping of women’s experiences in the EU. To give a broader perspective to the issue, I have interviewed women from two countries that in the EU context, can be seen as each other opposites. With a constructivist view of society as socially constructed, I have used two subclasses of New Institutionalism, Historic and Feminist Institutionalism, to analyze and categorize the material I gathered through semi-structured interviews. I came to the conclusion that women aren’t structurally excluded by informal situations in the European Union but that they have to conform to the masculine norm that permeates the EU:s formal and informal institution