Gender and Family in European Economic Policy

In the USA the change in women's role in the economy over the last quarter-century has been likened to 'a quiet revolution'. Can we also talk of a quiet 'revolution' in Europe? The present article addresses this question by reviewing key developments in women's labour market position at EU level over the last 20 years. Full integration of women in the labour market was a focal point of European Employment Strategy, based on the understanding that it is an essential ingredient of gender equality; but it recently lost priority in favour of human rights and anti-discrimination goals. Policy responses to the financial crisis accelerated this change in priorities together with the perception that men are the real losers of the crisis. However, a stock-taking of women's integration into the labour market at EU level shows that two large obstacles stand in the way of full integration: regional imbalances and the secondary earner question. Female employment recently outperformed male employment, but fiscal consolidation policies currently hinder advancement in countries like the so-called GIPSI group, where progress is needed most. Meanwhile differences with respect to men in pension income or total earnings remain high at around forty percent. Reconciliation policy at EU level – leave design and care service provisioning in particular – had not consistently helped rebalance the gender division of labour within households. It needs recasting for a truly revolutionary change in women’s role in the economy to materialize.

The introduction of gender quota regulations for corporate boards in France and Germany between 2011 and 2015 led to heated debates. These centred on the re-emergence of a policy instrument thought of as highly constraining to employers’ human resource management strategies. The European Commission also proposed to act on the issue in case of national inaction, which led to international momentum towards change. In this chapter, we question the historical re-emergence of this instrument in two quite heterogeneous national policy regimes for gender equality in employment and analyse the legislative design of successive waves of gender quotas especially in civil services. We also explore the argumentation patterns developed by the proponents of the most recent regulations. We show that the new acceptability of gender quotas, especially among conservative parties and governments, lies in an acute malleability that fiercely contradicts the image of a highly constraining instrument for gender equality in employment. This comparative analysis evidences durable ‘symbolic policy making’ through gender quotas. Nevertheless, renewed pro-quota discourse among conservative parties proves that a symbolic instrument does have the power to provoke genuine institutional change in gender equality policy making.

This chapter looks into the two legal routes France and the UK have chosen to enforce equal pay legislation, and more specifically the complicated relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies to advance equality. Whereas France has relied on state intervention and, more recently, on collective bargaining to implement equal pay policies, we argue that lessons could be drawn from the British case where trade unions’ mass litigation strategies have resulted in an unequalled understanding of the concepts of equal value and indirect discrimination, and the development of comprehensive methods of job evaluation. While being very controversial, this litigious approach has demonstrated an emerging relationship between the system of collective bargaining and the litigation process depicted as complements, allowing to address implicit representations of the value of women’s work and to challenge traditional unions’ views on collective bargaining.

What explains the adoption of two different policies on equal pay by gender (EPG) and by nationality (EPN) in Switzerland? And why is the liberal, litigation-based, equal pay policy regime set up by the Gender Equality Act of 1996 much less effective than the neocorporatist ‘accompanying measures’ to the Bilateral European Union–Switzerland Agreement on Free Movement of Persons adopted in 1999 to ensure equal pay for workers of different national origins? The formation of two different policy regimes cannot be explained by different levels of political will. Equally, different ‘varieties of capitalism’ cannot explain the setup of the two different equal pay policy regimes within the very same country. Instead, our qualitative comparative analysis across time suggests that the differences can be best explained by a particular constellation of attributes, namely the use of different policy frames—that is, ‘anti-discrimination’ in the EPG and ‘unfair competition’ in the EPN case—and the different setting of interest politics epitomised by the opposite stances adopted by Switzerland’s employer associations in the two cases.

The paper starts with theoretical assumptions and empirical findings on gender equality effects of reconciliation policies. Thereafter, childcare provision and parental leave schemes in Austria, Germany and Iceland are compared. While Germany and Austria may be classified as optional familialistic with a choice between paid parental leave and childcare services, Iceland follows a strong adult worker model with familizing and de-familizing policies in quick succession. Leave take-up rates of fathers and employment rates of mothers differ enormously between the three countries. This is due to differences in policy design with regard to father’s quotas, benefit levels and the length of the leave as well as to the availability of high quality childcare services. The advantages and shortfalls of the three different models of reconciliation will be analysed from a gender equality perspective.

The goal of this chapter is to present the reforms of family policies in Poland and to analytically assess their direction and possible gendered effects. In particular, I will focus on three policy fields: parental leave reforms, childcare services and support in cash including child allowances and tax credits. My main argument is that the reforms of family policies extending financial family support might signal transformative change of the policy model from implicit to explicit familialism, as increase in monetary support is accompanied by only weak development of care services. Although Poland went quite smoothly through the economic crisis, the country did not invest so much in care services, but rather in financial support for the families, with stronger maternalist direction in public discourse on childbearing, especially during the right-wing coalition in office since November 2015.

In this article, parental leave reforms in two different welfare states and care regimes, Sweden and Germany, are compared in the context of varying paradigms: social investment and gender equality. Starting with theorizing these two approaches, we have developed an analytical framework of the overlaps and differences between them. Thereafter, we empirically analyse paid parental leave reforms since the turn of the millennium: the first, in Sweden, which is the prototype of a two-earner/carer model, and then in Germany, a (modernized) male breadwinner model. While gender equality aims dominate Swedish parental leave politics, the social investment strategy is more prominent within German policy debates. The actual design of policy instruments, however, shows less clear differences as the parental leave policies are influenced by a mixture of the two paradigms in both countries. In our conclusion, we interpret our empirical findings with regard to social policy traditions and trajectories.

A large number of countries in the world have implemented policies designed to advance the political representation of women. Sixteen years after the “parity law” was passed in France, the present article evaluates its mixed effects on the process of political professionalisation and on gender relations. Based on several surveys conducted between 2001 and 2016 at different institutional levels, the article traces the genesis of the law and outlines certain French paradoxes concerning gender and political issues. It then provides a quantitative review of the impact of the law in the political field and concludes by showing that dominant professional politicians use gender-equality measures in a way that allows them to preserve masculine power and in-group sociability and to reproduce a conservative gender order.

In the last 15 years, political representation of women both in parliaments and in governments in Europe has increased. Interestingly, increases occurred in countries with legislated gender quotas, but also in states where softer voluntary party quotas exist as well as with parties that do not have any formal quota. How can we account for this improvement? Feminist political research has argued that a comprehensive model of explanation is needed that takes into account social structures as well as norms and institutions. However, the causal relations and differentiated influences are far from clear. This paper takes this “magic triangle” as a starting point and uses comparative data for all three kinds of factors to search for causal relationships with the development of female representation in national parliaments. We apply regression analysis, explorative clustering and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fzQCA). Consistent results obtained from all methods applied include the complementarity of legislated gender quotas, on the one hand, and voluntary quotas with good electoral proportionality, on the other hand. Socio-economic data had no reasonable impact on women’s representation in Europe. Political culture, like the tradition of universal female suffrage, proved to be sometimes relevant. However, we need better qualitative and quantitative data for political culture for further investigations.

In Europe and around the world, electoral gender quotas are used to promote gender-balanced political representation. Since the turn of the millennium, notably legislated candidate quotas have led to remarkable results. This article focuses on two country cases where women’s political representation is particularly high: the Nordic States and Rwanda. In these countries very diverse types of quotas are applied, whether as voluntary party quotas, reserved seats quotas, legislated candidate quotas, a combination of quotas, or no quotas at all. So do quotas account for a high representation of women in these countries, and if so in which way? We argue that the success of electoral gender quotas does not depend solely on a particular type of quota, but on the political environment, the institutional framework, the quota design, as well as on regional factors.

Following the policy cycle, some decisive steps could be described: feminist actors generate a politics of visibility that still is the starting point of every European gender equality reform. To be successful, a politics of framing must fit into uncontroversial, conventional perceptions of gender, democracy and the state. Besides an appropriate cognitive structure, financial, temporal and institutional resources need to be made available for women/mothers and men/fathers; the sustainability of every other reform rests on this politics of facilities. Governmental actors adopt societal ideas of reform and adapt them to state arenas in a politics of translation that is marked by tensions between state feminism and the bureaucratisation of feminism. At this historic moment in Europe, successful translation and implementation of gender equality reforms could best be argued within a conservative framing, especially difference-feminist arguments. Paradoxically, such frames seem to be best to override reactionary frames.