Transformations in EU Gender Equality

From emergence to dismantling

Sophie Jacquot

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137436573
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a context of economic and budgetary crisis, this book presents a long-term analysis of the transformations of EU gender equality. It analyses the mechanisms of construction, consolidation and deconstruction of this policy and questions the effects of its current dismantling.

1

Introduction: Analysing Change in European Gender Equality Policy

On 16 February 1966, 3000 female workers from the Belgian national weapons manufacturer, Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre de Herstal, began a strike that would last for 12 weeks. Their slogan was ‘Equal work for equal pay!’ Their main demand was the application of Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome at the national level. This Article establishes the principle of equal pay between men and women in the six founding member states of the European Community (EC).

On 15 September 2010, a European coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) promoting women’s rights launched a campaign on the question of women asylum seekers, under the slogan ‘persecution is not neutral’. Its goal was to have ‘gender persecution’ (genital mutilation, rape as a weapon of war, forced marriage, honour crimes, etc.) recognised as legitimate grounds for demanding refugee status in the member states of the European Union (EU) in order to ensure greater protection for victims.

More than forty years apart, both these mobilisations show the persistent links between women and Europe and the ability of women in Europe to call on these institutions in defence of their rights. The EC, and then the EU, emerged as a space that is open to possibilities and able to accommodate demands to fight against gender inequalities. Mobilisations by women’s groups and feminist groups are also a reflection of the evolution of the very definition of the principle of equality. In each of these two periods, ‘gender equality’ covers very different understandings of what might constitute a category of legitimate public action at the European level. In the first instance, the slogan ‘Equal work for equal pay!’ is a direct demand for equality of rights between men and women: they must be treated the same. To achieve this, existing inequalities must be corrected by transposing European dispositions into national legislation. In the second case, the reference to ‘gender’ calls for inequalities between men and women to be made visible; for an awareness of the differentiation that exists between the social and cultural classifications of male and female and the recognition that this hierarchy is the basis for the power relations and domination that women are victims of. It is thus a matter of integrating an understanding of this differentiation into asylum policy so that it contributes to the requirements in terms of equality.

The 1966 strike and the lobby campaign of 2010 testify as to the – in many ways unpredictable – progress of the European integration process: the construction of a political system with multiple actors and levels, the extension of its jurisdiction to areas of sovereignty (not limited to the functioning of the common market) and the enlargement of its borders. But these two examples demonstrate above all the evolution of the frame of relations between women and Europe; in other words, the appearance of a specific public policy dedicated to gender equality. When the female workers of Herstal demanded the concrete transposition of Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome (which makes equal pay an objective of the Treaty), this article was the only element – material or symbolic – that could support European intervention into the area of gender equality. The demand for its application implicitly revealed the absence of any kind of policy and limited its possible jurisdiction to equal pay. Lobbying by NGOs for gender to be taken more into account in the area of asylum was also part of a broader context. Indeed, more than fifty years after the Herstal strike, the principle of gender equality is now recognised as a fundamental right and constitutes one of the EU’s missions for action. This action is based on a range of instruments, on the functioning of specific structures within the different institutions of the EU and on the consultation and the participation of various actors, including NGOs. Moreover, the desire of women’s rights organisations to influence the criteria according to which asylum is granted is coherent with a gender equality policy with extremely diverse areas of intervention and in which equal pay is now simply one objective among others.

The trajectory of European intervention in the fight against gender inequalities is the object of this book. Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 contained the seed of this intervention and it was brought to life by the Belgian workers in 1966. Today it is widely developed and multifarious. The question that is at the heart of this research concerns the transformations of European gender equality policy; the goal is to explore its emergence, its institutionalisation and its evolution at the European level, in an environment that is in constant flux.

I.

What is gender equality policy?

Gender equality policies are public policies whose principal objective is the fight against gender inequalities and the promotion of equality between women and men. It is also frequently described as gender policy or feminist policy (Kantola, 2010c; Mazur, 2002). Gender equality policies can be distinguished from policies of rights or for the promotion of rights (Baudot and Revillard, 2014), as well as from anti-discrimination policies (Geddes and Guiraudon, 2004). In addition to the question of the different boundaries which characterise these types of public policies,1 the essential difference between them is that gender equality policies are not solely focused on the application of rights and on the fight against differential treatment between categories of inequalities. Unlike gender equality policy, one of the characteristics of anti-discrimination policies is to focus on an individual approach to discrimination and on modes of public action which favour a judicial treatment of inequalities (Krizsan et al., 2012).

Gender equality policies take many different forms and are deployed in numerous sectors (in terms of rights, political representation, equality at work, work and family life balance, violence, etc.).2 By definition, gender runs through all aspects of the political process (from elaboration to implementation) and all public policy areas (budget, health, peacekeeping, asylum, retirement, etc.). Gender equality policies intrinsically challenge the sectorisation of public action and question the traditional modes of dealing with public issues (Jacquot and Mazur, 2010). As a result, these policies have particular heuristic value for our understanding of the contemporary transformations of public action.

A.

The different conceptualisations of the principle of gender equality

In order to explore European gender equality policy we must first understand the range of possible meanings covered by the notion of gender equality. Different understandings of this principle have led to different political strategies (Squires, 2007). The three major manifestations of this principle are: equal treatment, which is based on the concept of equal rights and implemented through the law; equal opportunities, which is based on the concept of difference and incarnated politically through positive action or positive discrimination measures; and equal impact, which is based on the concept of gender and primarily operates through instruments such as gender mainstreaming. Most feminist analyses agree that like a ‘three-legged stool’ (Booth and Bennett, 2002) gender equality policy can only pursue its objectives if it is stable and achieves a balance between these three main incarnations of the principle of gender equality (see Table 1.1).

The principle of equal treatment is based on the modification of traditional systems of discriminatory norms towards women and on the development of new anti-discrimination norms to promote gender equality. It is thus a matter of acting through the law and on the law in order to correct the inequalities in the judicial and regulatory systems, which reflect values that are no longer predominantly shared by society. As a result, this strategy is to a large extent based on legislators, as well as on the evolutions of jurisprudence. But it is also based on the degree of application of the new norms and is thus dependent on the prior goodwill of the state and its institutions for the implementation of judicial norms, and then later on the goodwill of the Courts of Justice and the mobilisation of women’s interest groups. This mechanism indeed awards an important place to the mobilisation and collective action of plaintiffs to move jurisprudence forward, yet national structures of collective mobilisation linked to this kind of activity possess different characteristics (organisational structures, links to the state and state feminism, repertories of legal collective action, etc.), and as a result they have an unpredictable impact (Caporaso and Jupille, 2001; Jacquot and Vitale, 2014). Equality by law, which is necessary for the correction of the most flagrant direct inequalities, therefore does not address the gap between equality in rights and equality in fact, and may leave a gap between the application and the formal respect of the law.

Table 1.1 The conceptualisations of the principle of gender equality

It was specifically this inability to address the gap between norms and reality that led to the principle of equal opportunities based on the concept of difference. The political strategy here consists in fighting de facto discrimination with de jure discrimination by creating legal inequalities that combat concrete inequalities. This strategy is designed to redress differences between groups, to compensate for the effects of history, and is manifested through positive action or positive discrimination measures. Positive action measures correspond to temporary derogations from the fundamental law of non-discrimination, in order to compensate for existing inequalities which limit women’s possibilities in certain areas. They are incarnated in funding programmes (subsidies, tax credits, etc.), training specifically for women and generally in areas dealing with access to employment, education and entrepreneurship. Positive discrimination measures are a more ambitious form of positive action and ensure that women have equal access (if necessary via quotas) particularly in terms of jobs and careers. Generally these are mechanisms designed to increase the participation of disadvantaged groups. The management of these measures, from the 1960s to the 1980s, was attributed by member states to structures in specific sectors, and responsibility was given to either non-specialised actors within the bureaucracy or to external specialists in the area (Mazur and McBride Stetson, 1995, 2010). However, the principle of equal opportunities remains marginalised within the political process and is too limited in terms of the political domains concerned. It is therefore not able to respond to the multiple dimensions of inequality.

The development of the concept of gender has attracted the attention of social sciences to the social construction of inequalities and the power relations involved in this process. A whole movement for redefining and interrogating traditional approaches and concepts has developed. Whereas the classic diptych equality/difference only allows us to analyse the consequences of the differences between sexes (should women be treated differently or the same as men?), the gender approach questions the reasons that this difference came to acquire such importance as a structural factor in social relations of subordination. Equality and difference only allow us to deal with the problem of inequalities after the fact. Moreover, these analytical perspectives focus only on women, considered as an ‘other’ category compared to the male norm; they do not interrogate the relations between men and women as a social relationship of power. Nor do they question it as a conceptual relationship which implies that this vision makes women alone responsible for the resolution of inequalities – both as individuals and as a group.

The notion of gender provides an alternative approach by attempting to understand and deconstruct the reasons for male domination. Considering that the power to discriminate is structural and stems from the institutionalisation of hierarchical relations between men and women has two main implications. Firstly it implies that gender differences can no longer be exclusively considered a women’s problem. It is the history of social relations that has resulted in institutions and actors reproducing inequalities. Furthermore, considering discrimination from a structural perspective means considering policies as both a cause and a solution. The former because policies participate in the construction and especially the perpetuation of structural barriers and disadvantages, and the latter because they also act on the structures themselves and can negotiate between the impossibly tangled threads of equality and difference. The use of gender enabled a final objective to be conceived and defined in the form of equality between women and men, preserving the complementarity between difference and equal rights whilst also surpassing them. Relations of domination, and thus also gender inequalities, are constructed and inscribed in social structures for the most part. Because sex-based domination is systemic, it is indeed the system in its entirety that must be taken into account in the treatment of these inequalities.

It is on these bases that gender mainstreaming emerged as the third type of political strategy, derived from the principle of equal impact. It aimed to enlarge the range of possible actions by systematically incorporating questions linked to gender into all institutions and political domains. From this perspective, ‘tackling inequality is no longer about finding the right policy but about ensuring that all policies are right’ (Beveridge et al., 2000, p. 278). In focusing the action on the political process, the main characteristic of this strategy is its horizontal intervention which identifies the possible effects of these policies and political choices on gender. Transversality is thus the main quality of gender mainstreaming. Paying attention to all policies enables the private sphere to also be included in the public action design (recognition of unequal distribution of family responsibilities, or sexual harassment in employment policy, for example). From transversal action stems the other specificities of gender mainstreaming compared to the two other political strategies. The fact that attention to gender is systematically integrated into each political area, with all sectors of public action contributing, implies that the actors of gender mainstreaming are the usual actors in charge of each of these sectors. Equality specialists intervene more for the coordination of the process or for specific support missions. Furthermore, horizontal also means sequential. Gender mainstreaming is supposed to intervene during each sequence of the political process. It is this aspect, intervention from the very definition and conception of policies, that enables this policy to avoid simply having an a posteriori impact. Instead, it is able to modify a proposal seen as having negative effects on gender relations. Transversality in the political process is thus a necessary condition for anticipative action able to address the roots o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Analysing Change in European Gender Equality Policy
• 2 From Rome to Maastricht: The Golden Age of an Exceptional Policy?
• 3 The Era of Gender Mainstreaming
• 4 From Maastricht to Lisbon: The Normalisation of a Policy
• 5 Lisbon and Beyond: A Policy in Crisis
• 6 Conclusion: The End of a Policy?
• Appendix: List of Interviews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index