Mainstreamed Away? The European Employment Strategy and its Gender Equality Dimension

Pfister, Thomas. (2007) Mainstreamed Away? The European Employment Strategy and its Gender Equality Dimension. In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2007 (10th), May 17-19, 2007, pages 25, Montreal, Canada.

Abstract

This paper starts from two significant developments in the field of social and employment policies in the European Union (EU). First, the contents are increasingly informed by a strong activation discourse. Second, by inventing the European Employment Strategy (EES), the EU managed to significantly expand its activities into this realm. On the one hand, this turn towards activation has massive implications for gender norms and relations. On the other hand, the EU is a major proponent of gender equality and gender mainstreaming. Therefore, this paper focuses on the strategy’s specific gender equality dimension because the consequences in terms of potential exclusion and inequality will become particularly visible in this area. It scrutinises whether the EES is able to highlight and to promote equal opportunities within the general activation agenda. Comparing its reception in Germany, the United Kingdom and Hungary the paper argues that the EES is best understood as specific process of conceptual debate, which has dramatically failed in its gender equality dimension. Thereby, the Union is missing a crucial opportunity to tackle one key aspect of gendered exclusion from equal citizenship – inequalities between women and men in social policies and the labour market.