A new vision of gender equality in Europe?

Abstract

More than a decade into the twenty- first century, the issue of gender equality remains important in the European Union. Without a clear analysis of gendered processes in paid and unpaid work, policy making, and structural change, we cannot fully grasp the performance of European labour markets over the last quarter- century, nor the impact of the economic crisis that is still with us, or the challenges that will face Europe in the coming decades. Gender gaps are still visible in almost all areas of economic life within the EU and even if some gaps are closing, for example in relation to employment rates, new gaps are emerging and others persist, for example in the job quality domain. Yet on the international scoreboard of gender equality, the European Union fares moderately well. Its Nordic members consistently feature among the top ten countries for gender equality in three of the latest worldwide indices of gender equality. And if we take the simple average of each index across EU member countries, the European Union performs roughly as well as the United States and better than Japan, though worse than Australia. 1 European social policy ought to be given part of the credit. Gender equality has always been a constituent part of the European Social Model, although the focus and the actual policies may have differed over time (for an overview, see Rees 1998). The principle of equal pay for equal work was there from the very beginning, although the emphasis on equal wages was primarily inspired by the fear of unfair competition between men and women rather than any concerns about inequality per se. Over time the focus shifted towards positive action in acknowledgement of the fact that specific programmes are needed in order to overcome some of the barriers that impede equality. Positive- action programmes should have enabled women to compete more effectively in the European labour markets, but they actually proved unable to widely and effectively challenge the existing socio- economic framework. This very challenge was at the core of the third and most radical approach, gender mainstreaming, which was brought into European policy in the mid- 1990s. Policies based on gender mainstreaming are premised on the recognition that efforts to improve the position of women in the labour market should no longer be seen as a separate policy item. Rather, an embedded approach is advocated in which gender issues form an integral part of any major labour market policy. At a more practical level, this also implies that