As the European Union begins to play with LEGO®, what are the consequences for women?

Jenson, Jane. (2007) As the European Union begins to play with LEGO®, what are the consequences for women? In: UNSPECIFIED, Montreal, Canada. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the introduction]. We might ask, therefore, what have been and might be the consequences for women of taking up LEGO-like ideas? In some countries where they are well advanced, policy attention to gender equality has been significantly side-lined (Dobrowolsky and Jenson, 2004). Is or will the same thing happen in the European Union, where the governmental machinery for equal opportunities – now termed gender equality – has been so robust? Answering such questions requires several analytic steps. A first is to document the move towards LEGO® at the EU level. The second is to tease out and untangle the consequences for the way the EU addresses gender equality, an objective which has been associated with the Union if not from the insertion of article 119 into the Treaty of Rome certainly since the 1970s. For some researchers, there has been backtracking on the more ambitious agenda of the 1990s. Maria Stratigaki (2004), for example, argues that the incorporation of the instruments to reconcile work and family life (childcare, parental leaves, working time improvements) into the European Employment Strategy (EES) constitutes a process of “cooptation,” because the original feminist potential of the instrument has been subordinated to market-oriented priorities. What the next pages document in the more recent chapters of this story is more than cooptation; it is one of writing women out of the plot or folding them in to other stories.

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