Women away from the altar! Resistance to the gender equality pressures in the Polish organisations of the Catholic Church in England, Sweden, and Belgium

This article examines the practices that maintain the gender asymmetry in transnational migratory religious organisations, as exemplified by the Polish organisations of the Roman Catholic Church (so-called Polish Catholic Missions). Based on interviews with women and men involved in these structures as well as on our observations during fieldwork, we reconstruct the gendered division of work in such organisations, with a special focus on differentiation within the area of religious functions. Drawing on integrative theories of gender (especially of Raewyn Connell) and on the new institutionalist understanding of organisations, we investigate how and why these transnational religious bodies resist the normative pressures regarding gender equality stemming from the egalitarian contexts in which they function (England, Belgium, and Sweden).