The rural Swedish north is under reconstruction. The challenges of living and working in the region are dealt with through the regional growth policy area. In this article, the applications that received funds from the EU's regional structural funding programme directed towards the Swedish north are studied. Distributions of such funds are, of course, evaluated and audited by all established rules and regulation. Evaluations that every year conclude that labour market sectors that traditionally employ women get less funding than sectors that employ men and that no significant change in this pattern has been seen over the years. How can this be understood? The funded projects applications are thematically structured using topic modelling, and after that, analysed using deconstructive policy analysis to understand how different subject positions are discursively constructed in the implementation of the regional growth policy. Concluding that, despite the high ambition, the policy that is supposed to enable opportunities for everyone to live and earn a living throughout the entire country, risks instead of being part of recreating established norms and