Polarized Equality? Ideological and Affective Divides Over Gender Equality in Europe

The European Union (EU) has been characterized as a “gender regime” with its distinctive patterns of gender (in)equalities and path dependencies. Gender equality policies have developed as a genuine policy field over the past decades from a single treaty article to a comprehensive legal and political framework dealing with multiple sources of discrimination. Besides, gender equality policies are frequently linked to other political projects and policy goals. Gender equality is often presented as a foundational value of the EU with reference to the Treaties of Amsterdam and Lisbon. Research has pointed out that it is an important aspect of the foundational myth of the EU. The development of gender equality policies has been characterized by alternations between progress and stagnation. These policies are also met by resistance. However, a general conclusion is that EU institutions have been important catalysts in shaping women’s economic, political, and social equality in Europe and in putting equality rights into effect. Historical, political, and sociological interpretations of the EU’s gender equality policies illustrate these dynamics. Gender equality policies are described in terms of the following phases: the 1970s (associated with women’s civil and economic rights and equal treatment), the 1980s (equal opportunities, positive action), and the 1990s (gender mainstreaming in the whole union and for all policy areas). Since the 2000s, a fourth phase of new policies against multiple discrimination has been developing. These different stages of EU gender policy continue to coexist. When the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force in 1999, the EU committed to a new approach to work for gender equality through mainstreaming. Gender equality and nondiscrimination became guiding legal principles of the union. The Treaty of Lisbon reflects core vaues of the EU such as democracy, human rights and gender equality. One can approach gender equality policies as situated between concerns for gender equality and multiple discrimination on the one hand and priorities of economy and finance on the other. Critical voices in the literature have pointed out that these priorities have outperformed ideas about gender equality. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, EU austerity policies represent a “critical juncture” that could undo the long-term progress achieved in gender equality in Europe. Besides, gender equality policies suffer from a gap between institutionalization on the one hand and a lack of consistency and full political commitment on the other. In a context of a more permanent crisis scenario in the EU, gender equality policies are undergoing transformations and they are subject to change to the worse. A key point is that dynamic gender relations, multiple discrimination, and women’s various roles in society matter for understanding the EU and European integration. This raises questions about the EU’s role as a driving force for gender equality and against multiple discrimination. What happened to gender equality policies and to gendered effects of other policies as a result of the various crises in the EU?

Medical abortion (MA) is recommended by the WHO as a safe and effective pregnancy termination method in the first trimester. From a feminist perspective, it is a non-medicalised, self-managed, emancipating procedure allowing persons seeking abortion to be more in control of their abortion, as opposed to surgical procedures. In European countries where MA is legal, the proportion of MA (relative to surgical abortions) varies greatly. We hypothesised that this ratio may be partly explained by country-level dimensions of gender equality. We assessed the association between MA ratios and gender equality in Europe in correlation and regression analyses, using several country-level gender equality indices. The relevance of other factors, i.e. date of introduction of MA and pregnancy week until which MA is permitted, was also investigated. MA ratios ranged from 24.4% (Italy) to 97.7% (Finland). MA was more frequent relative to surgical abortion in countries with higher levels of gender equality. All gender equality indices were associated with MA ratios (e.g. Global Gender Gap Index corr. coeff: 0.761, p < 0.0001). Specifically, markers of economic and political gender equality seemed to drive the correlations. The pregnancy week until which MA is permitted was associated with both gender equality and MA ratios. Our study suggests that women’s participation in the economic and political sphere may have repercussions on the methods offered and used through abortion services. It highlights the link between feminist perspectives, reproductive health policies and practices, and gender equality, especially in terms of access to economic resources and political representation.

The book provides a systematic scientific overview of gender mainstreaming in Europe. It recalls the main steps of the origins and the development of the European gender mainstreaming (GM) strategy. The book also connects this framework with the current situation of gender equality and explores the strength and weak points of the strategy. To do so, it provides a critical evaluation of the instruments used to measure gender equality and explores how societal aspects, such as the opportunity structure defined by work-family balance policies and practices, affect the individual values of gender equality supporting the development of gender egalitarian cultures. Further, it develops an outline of the current and future challenges of the gender mainstreaming strategy, that run in parallel with the general European Union’s challenges, such as the integration process, economic crisis, migration and refugees crisis, and the rise of right-wing Euroscepticism. In addition, the old but always current problem of conceptualizing gender equality in different ways leading to jeopardized results. The book offers a critical review of the GM strategy in Europe and analyses whether and how gender equality in Europe is improving, with a specific interest in the cultural differences between the European countries where this common strategy is implemented.

This chapter unpacks the notion of “oppositional success” using the case of La Manif pour Tous (LMPT), the movement that opposed same-sex marriage in France in 2012-2013. This movement can indeed be regarded as successful. Although same-sex marriage was adopted, LMPT managed to organize among the biggest demonstrations in the last 30 years. It has significantly shaped public debates and altered the content of the law, becoming a crucial political and social actor in contemporary France. Contesting the idea of French exceptionalism, this chapter discusses the factors explaining this expected success and argues that the latter can neither exclusively be explained by any alleged cultural and historical specificities nor by its important resources and successfully resonating frames. Rather, this chapter shows that this oppositional success is best understood as the consequence of a unique arrangement of contextual opportunities that allowed LMPT to grow and build support beyond its traditional circles. It also demonstrates the validity of social movement theory to address recent cases of opposition to gender and sexuality equality in Europe.

This paper shows influence of gender equality on economy where it analyzed how gender equality in Europe has affected on the development of the frozen food industry and services related to childcare. The development of these industries has given a positive impulse to the development of the whole economy. In this analysis, it is used multiple regressions as one of the most important statistical methods. In the first part of this paper, it shows theconnection among the growth of female employment, growth in frozen food expenditure and growth of GDP in United Kingdom. In the second part of paper, it shows the relationship among the growth of labor force participation of women, growth of number of kindergarten and growth of GDP in Hungary. To proof these relationships, it used a multiple regression model. This statistical model was tested by using the T schedule which showed that the model in both the analyses is correct. At the end of the paper, it presents that employment rate and GDP behaves in the same way in European Union. These analyses show that it is necessary to continue to strengthen gender equality if the policy makers want to achieve even greater economic growth. The issue of gender equality is a very important factor in creating employment policy, and statisticians should be more involved in process of employment policy and gender equality.

The gender gap problem reflects persistent inequalities between men and women across economic participation, education, health, and political representation, driven by social, cultural, and institutional biases that restrict equal opportunities and outcomes. This paper explores the state of gender equality in Europe by constructing composite variables for each area through principal component analysis and applying cluster analysis to classify countries into four distinct groups. The first cluster includes Nordic countries with nearly complete gender equality; the second cluster consists of developed Western European countries with high educational and health outcomes, but lower political and economic opportunities for women. The third cluster comprises former socialist bloc countries with moderate educational and health indicators, but low economic and political inclusion of women, and finally the fourth cluster includes countries with significant challenges in achieving equality due to traditional norms and weak policies. The results indicate the need for tailored policies that would enhance economic opportunities and political participation for women, depending on the specific characteristics of each group of countries.

This article presents a composite indicator designed to measure and compare existing structural gender equality in the countries of the European Union. The construction of an index is always a complex task which requires making a great many important conceptual, analytical and empirical decisions. This complexity explains the wide variety of gender equality indices created during the last 25 years. All the proposed indices attempt to measure the same thing, gender (in)equality, but none of them define the concept they want to measure in exactly the same way, nor do they operationalize measurement in the same manner. Taking into account the methodology of these preceding approaches, this article explains the basis for the most important analytical and conceptual decisions made in constructing the European Gender Equality Index. The article also includes the overall scores obtained by the 27 European countries on this index, on its three basic dimensions (education, work and power), and on the eighteen indicators that make up its structure. With this data, corresponding to 2009, an adequate analysis of gender equality in Europe can be established.

This article argues that translating social research findings into policy recommendations may pose a significant methodological and practical challenge. Due to the current emphasis on the ‘third mission’ of universities and the ‘relevance’ of scientific knowledge, it has become more common for sociologists to engage in projects that include the development of social-research-based recommendations. This article analyses empirically an example of such a project – an extensive, European Commission–funded study about the role of men in gender equality in Europe – and shows that developing recommendations may receive lower priority than producing findings, be unguided by any specific method or approach, and operate within an ‘aura of evidence’ rather than a ‘hierarchy of evidence’. Discouraging an all-too-easy criticism, this article argues for more reflection, frameworks, and methods that could support sociologists in the development of research-based guidelines for policies.

With gender equality so prominent in public debate, this timely book reviews the impacts of gender mainstreaming on political, social and cultural issues around Europe. It explores the origins and evolution of mainstreaming, the theory's contribution to gender equality legislation so far and its potential to drive change in the future. Drawing on extensive data, the book compares and contrasts progress in various European countries, taking into account the multidimensionality of gender equality. Finally, the book considers the limits of gender mainstreaming amid economic, migration and political challenges. This important book is a welcome contribution to discussions about gender equality in European societies looking at the interplay of policies, culture and public opinion.

This chapter dealswith the complex task of measuring gender equality across European countriesby assuming two principal perspectives: the use of macro indicators, developed using gender statistics and describingthe country’s situation;and the employment of micro-level indicators, which are built on survey-population measurements, such as ISSP and Eurobarometer, and refer to individuals’ perspectives on gender issues. The critical overview provided on the international indicesspeaks to different conceptualisations of gender equality. This requires awareness not only among scholars interested in the study of gender equality, but also among policymakers and audit bodies that evaluate policies. The EIGE Gender Equality Index, developed in the gender-mainstreaming perspective’s framework by the European Institute for Gender Equality,appears particularly meaningful for evaluating gender equality according to the overall European strategy. The measurement of gender-equality issues through surveys needs better conceptualisations, which so farmainly refer to women’s double role as working mothers, thereby neglecting gender equality’s multidimensionality and the fact that it encompasses the status of both women and men.

The data was gathered with the aim to generate empirical knowledge about gendered European party politics and the ways in which these affect the prospects for democracy and gender equality in Europe. It also aimed to innovate the study of formal and informal institutions and discourses in party politics. This chapter presents the data and highlights the methodological innovations they generated in the understanding of genderedness of the European Parliament. The chapter outlines how data collection occurred in two phases: a pilot study and the main data-gathering period. Overall, 140 interviews, 193 pages of fieldnotes and a wealth of internal documents from the European Parliament and its political groups were gathered during these two phases. Tables illustrate the distribution by gender and nationality, as well as the political group affiliation and role of the research participants in the European Parliament to stress the variety of the data. The chapter explains and demonstrates recording practices and techniques for parliamentary ethnography, which enabled a detailed understanding of informal political group dynamics. Finally, the chapter describes how the research data was processed, archived and categorised, drawing on lessons from the pilot study.

This paper presents the annual time series and the average annual growth rate of the European Gender Equality Index, which was proposed by Bericat (Soc Indic Res 108:1–28, 2012), for the EU and its 27 member countries for the period 2000–2011. The paper also reports the time series and average annual growth rate for each of the three subdimensions of gender equality—education, work, and power—and the underlying indicators for each subdimension for EU as a whole. The calculated index shows that in the period 2000–2011, overall gender equality, equality in education, work, and power in the EU has been improving at a rate of 1.7, 0.92, 0.65, and 3.48 % per year, respectively. By 2011, overall gender equality, and equality in education, work, and power has reached 58.3, 77.4, 60.9, and 42.7, respectively. In short, this paper offers the scientific community, as well as those that design and implement public policies, a robust, valid and precise synthetic description of the current situation and evolution, from 2000 to 2011, of structural gender equality in European countries.

Women in Global Health (WGH) is a global movement with the largest network of women and allies working to challenge power and privilege for gender equity in health. It has grown to include over 50,000 supporters in 90 countries and has 41 official chapters. The WGH European network is an established hub of the global WGH movement focusing on gender equality in Europe Some of the WGH European Chapters have been engaged in the work with Ukrainian migrants.The workshop will start with a brief introduction to the WGH network and European hub. Following these opening remarks, the session will review the ongoing conflict in Ukraine through a gender equity lens, exploring what the crisis has taught us and how these experiences can help improve gender equity interventions in the future. The session will focus on two topics. 1) exploring the daily realities of women living in the conflict situation in Ukraine and 2) the situation of Ukrainian female refugees in European Member States. We will hear personal stories and accounts from Ukrainian women themselves and from professionals working with them both in-country and in European Member States. The inputs will be moderated in an interview style by one of the WGH European Chapter leads. The interviews will be followed by an interactive section where discussions will be facilitated with the audience in small groups. These discussions will centre on the accounts heard in the session and draw on any personal experience audience members may have of working with women in/from conflict situations, in Ukraine or elsewhere. In the plenary, we will then ask the small for feedback on their conversations. with the aim of discussing what the WGH movement can learn from these experiences with respect to applying them to interventions in gender equity in migrant health in the future. A final input from a female health leader will reflect on the session content and summarise its conclusions. Key messages • Gender equity can bring about transformative change in times of crisis. • Gender equity is not merely the ethical way to advance, but an operational necessity in time of crisis. Speakers/Panelists Sabine Ludwig Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany Halyna Skipalska Ukrainian Foundation for Public Health, Kyiv, Ukraine Paloma Cuchi WHO, Poland

1. A New Vision of Gender Equality in Europe? Francesca Bettio, Janneke Plantenga and Mark Smith PART I: The Economics of Gender Equality 2. Do We Have a Case for Gender Equality? Mark Smith, A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Francesca Bettio 3. Measuring Gender Equality Within the European Union Janneke Plantenga and Chantal Remery PART ii: Care and Work in Europe Today? 4. Unpaid Family Work in Europe: Gender and Country Differences Francesca Francavilla, Gianna C. Giannelli, Lucia Mangiavacchi and Luca Piccoli 5. Flexible Working Arrangements and Gender Equality: Categorising the European Member States Janneke Plantenga and Chantal Remery 6. Reconciliation of Work and Private Live Janneke Plantenga and Chantal Remery 7. Affordability of Care and Quality of Work. New Trends in Elderly Care Annamaria Simonazzi and Sara Picchi PART III: Policy, Promoting Change or Croding Equality? 8. The Role of the EES in the Promotion of Gender Equality in the Labour Market: a Critical Appraisal Paola Villa 9. Current Tax-Benefit Systems in Europe. Are They Fair to Working Women? Francesca Bettio and Alina Veroshchagina 10. Men and Gender Equality: Tachling Gender Segregation in Family Roles and in Social Care Jobs Colette Fagan and Helen Norman 11. Recession and Recovery: Making Gender Equality Part of the Solution Mark Smith and Paola Villa

This article examines how gender mainstreaming, as the predominant approach to gender equality in Europe, operates both as a strategy and a means of action within academia. The context is the European Union’s mandate for institutions to implement a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) that fosters gender equality between women and men and combats discrimination through gender mainstreaming, as a prerequisite for research funding. We delineate a distinction between gender mainstreaming as a strategy and as a means of action. This distinction serves as a framework for empirical studies on how Norwegian Universities and Research Organizations (UROs) articulate their rationale and methods for engaging with gender equality policies, as well as the policy areas they prioritize. Our analysis reveals that arguments for gender equality characterized by consensus are more prominently featured in the GEPs than those that might entail potential conflict. Furthermore, we explore how these various arguments contribute to either the integration or transformation of gender equality in academia, and how gender mainstreaming may have inadvertently undermined the politics of gender equality. This article contributes to the body of knowledge by highlighting the necessity for agenda-setting with binding priorities in gender mainstreaming, aligned with the current academic context.