Gender mainstreaming and gender equality in the EU: the impact of the EU employment strategy

Abstract

The visibility of the European Union’s commitment to gender equality has risen considerably since the agreement at the Luxembourg summit in 1997 to include strengthening equal opportunities between women and men as the fourth pillar of the employment guidelines, alongside those of employability, adaptability and entrepreneurship. The inclusion of a new guideline on gender mainstreaming in 1999 that requires member states to consider the gender impact of all policies under each of the pillars1 provided a further major impetus to the integration of equal opportunities issues into the employment framework. This impetus has been reinforced by many of the Council of Ministers recommendations on employment policy which have stressed the need to strengthen mainstreaming or other equal opportunities policies. The European employment strategy is part of the EU’s adoption of the socalled ‘open method of coordination’ (Goetschy, 2001; Rodrigues, 2001) which allows member states to develop policy programmes appropriate to their particular situation but according to agreed common guidelines. This approach is also likened to benchmarking (Terry and Towers, 2000; Tronti, 1999; Plantenga and Hansen, 1999). Employment was the first of these programmes to use action plans along common guidelines but has since been followed by social inclusion. However, in the recent period by far the most important EU influence on equal opportunities policies has come from the employment strategy.

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