Towards Gendering Institutionalism: Equality in Europe
260
Towards Gendering Institutionalism: Equality in Europe
260eBook
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Overview
The book takes a ‘best case’ scenario – with explicit transformative aims to the social (gendered) order – in order to illuminate how institutions and their gendering, help and hinder institutional change. In doing so, it aims to: 1) consolidate and expand the theoretical ‘toolkit’ in terms of synergies between feminism and new institutionalism’s various strands; and 2) bring it to bear on the trajectory of Europe’s gender equality agenda towards better understanding the institutional and institutionalized challenges to redressing gender inequalities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783489985 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/03/2017 |
| Series: | Feminist Institutionalist Perspectives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 881 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Elaine Weiner is an Associate Professor in Sociology at McGill University, Canada. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, work, and Central and East European societies. She is the author of Market Dreams: Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic (2007). She has also published chapters in various books as well as articles in journals such as the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Social Problems, and Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Equality Policies in the EU through a Feminist Historical Institutionalist Lens
Petra Debusscher and Anna van der Vleuten
Since the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957, interesting trends of 'thematic spill-over' have occurred in the field of gender equality (van der Vleuten 2007, 178). Over the decades, a supranational gender regime has developed and now extends far beyond the original legal right to equal pay. It includes various policy instruments such as action programmes, gender mainstreaming, and gender-responsive budgeting, and it covers many policy domains other than employment. The historical development of European Union (EU) gender equality policy has been characterised as a three-phased evolution, starting with equal treatment in the seventies, over positive action in the eighties, to gender mainstreaming in the late nineties (Jacquot 2015; Rees 1998). Some scholars distinguish a fourth phase because, since the end of the nineties, the EU's equality policy has expanded, not only to new fields, but also to cover multiple equality strands including race and ethnicity, religion and belief, age, disability, and sexual orientation. They argue that institutionally and normatively, this shift involves a move towards new solutions to tackling inequality and the emergence of 'a new politics of equality' (Kantola 2010, 2014, 2; Woodward 2012).
The aim of this chapter is to review this history from its very beginning until present day, applying a feminist historical institutionalist lens. Specifically, we draw on the notions of 'path dependencies' and 'critical junctures' from the historical institutionalist toolbox. Path dependency bares the ways in which slow-moving causal processes are linked, while 'critical junctures' or critical 'real-world' events provoke the destabilisation of institutions and may enable change resulting in new equilibria (Waylen 2009, 249). To this, feminist institutionalism (FI) adds a gender dimension which reveals how rules are gendered, how rules have gendered effects, and how the actors who make, break, or shape the rules are gendered (Chappell and Waylen 2013).
The next section presents the main features of feminist historical institutionalism. Subsequently, the different phases of EU gender equality policies are discussed with a focus on the extent to which they represent a new turn or, rather, reflect continuity. We conclude with a discussion of the insights gained by applying a feminist historical institutionalist lens.
A FEMINIST HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM
The potential of historical institutionalism (HI) is that it helps us to answer the more longitudinal questions, that is, how and why institutional change occurs (Waylen 2009). It allows the researcher to disentangle the bigger picture of how we ended up where we are now, what structures and larger processes have led to this point, as well as the mechanisms that lie behind these processes. HI sees institutions as 'historical creations of human agency whether intentional or unintentional' (Mackay and Meier 2003, 9) which are the outcome of past political conflict. Once created, institutions become important structuring contexts which constrain political action through the ideas and values embedded in them as well as through incentive structures (Mackay and Meier 2003). As a result, HI is good at explaining why continuity and incremental change often prevail in spite of on-going contestation and efforts to reform practices and policies.
With the aim of understanding how and why changes to EU (gender) equality policy are constrained or enabled by institutions, we use the notions of path dependency and critical junctures from the HI toolbox. In this chapter, we conceptualise path dependencies as the ideas, values, and standard operating procedures within institutions that send organisations along certain developmental paths. Although we acknowledge that institutions continue to evolve in response to changing environmental conditions and on-going political manoeuvring, they do so in ways constrained by past trajectories (Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992). Yet, despite this tendency towards continuity, both radical and incremental change occur. Historical institutionalists have developed the notion of critical junctures in order to explain how institutions are destabilised. Critical junctures refer to 'disjunctures between espoused values and actual practices within an institution or significant differences between institutionalised values and behaviours and societal norms' (Mackay and Meier 2003, 10). Consequently, critical junctures or critical real-world events may result in the destabilisation of institutions, setting path-dependent processes in motion and provoking a period of change before a new equilibrium is established (Waylen 2009).
In HI, gender is not included in the analysis, and institutions are implicitly considered to be gender neutral (Haastrup and Kenny 2016; Mackay and Meier 2003). Meanwhile, FI approaches acknowledge the gendered character of formal and informal institutions, in the sense that 'constructions of masculinity and femininity are intertwined in the daily culture or "logic" of political institutions' (Haastrup and Kenny 2016, 201). Furthermore, an FI lens adds an explicit gender power dimension to the analysis which reveals — from a gender perspective — 'not only who has the power to make institutional design decisions but also why some unexpected outcomes occur,' and why some policy outcomes are more difficult to achieve than others (Chappell and Waylen 2013, 600). Also, FI is particularly concerned with issues of voice and participation of women and therefore often explicitly turns its lens towards women's advocacy and women as agents of change (Debusscher 2014). Gendering (in the sense of adding a gender dimension) new institutionalism thus establishes gender as a key dimension of institutions and places gendered power relations at the forefront of institutional analysis. A feminist historical institutionalist lens will thus be particularly useful to shed light on the uneven history of European equality policy as it enables us to analyse agency by key actors — in both insider and outsider alliances — within a certain institutional context, in a way mindful of the pulling force of path-dependent institutional legacies, while being receptive to institutional change.
EU gender equality policies are often portrayed as a story which has gone through several different stages (Jacquot 2015). In this chapter, following feminist historical institutionalism, we will identify, for each stage, whether policy change was preceded and enabled by a critical juncture, to what extent change took place, and to what extent continuity prevailed as a result of path dependencies embedded in formal and informal institutions. Furthermore, we ask who was making, breaking, or shaping the rules, how these rules are gendered and have gendered effects (Gains and Lowndes 2014; see also Chappell and Waylen 2013). We start where it all started, in 1957, with the famous equal pay article in the founding treaty of the European Economic Community.
THE ECONOMIC PATH DEPENDENCY OF THE TREATY OF ROME (1955–1968)
The foundations of European gender equality policies can be traced back to the 1957 Treaty of Rome which laid the foundations for a customs union. It established the European Economic Community (EEC) as a follow-up to the European Coal and Steel Community, which had been created in 1951 as a common framework within which France and Germany could cooperate and compete economically, and avoid any further recourse to war (Hoskyns 1996). The main purpose of the Treaty of Rome was to create a 'Common Market' which would be characterised by the 'four freedoms,' that is, free movement of persons, services, goods, and capital. Not surprisingly, given this purpose, the core objectives of the Treaty were economic and were to be reached by the elimination of obstacles, so-called negative integration, rather than by introducing new legislation ('positive integration'). Negotiations on social policy were limited to the question of whether a degree of harmonisation of social costs for employers was required in order to ensure fair competition. German and Dutch negotiators opposed 'social harmonisation,' arguing that market integration would automatically lead to the elimination of differences in pay and other labour conditions. However, in order to prevent the French parliament from rejecting the Treaty of Rome, they accepted the inclusion of the principle that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work as a condition for the customs union to move to the next stage (van der Vleuten 2007, 49–50).
As a result, although women's pay was on the agenda of the negotiators from the start, it was not discussed in terms of social justice (equal pay for work of equal value) but in terms of eliminating economic distortions (Hoskyns 1996). Consequently, equal pay was initially inserted as Article 46 in the chapter 'Distortions.' Only in the last round of revisions was it moved to the 'Social Provisions' chapter in order to strengthen the social outlook of the Treaty and appease the international trade unions as well as the social democrats in the national parliaments (van der Vleuten 2001, 2007). The equal pay principle was re-numbered Article 119 and stood out as the most strictly formulated article in the social chapter, which further mainly contained broad aims of a noncommittal character.
In short, gender equality was moulded into a market-making project based on the logic of removing obstacles to the four freedoms by a binding obligation to introduce formal equality as regards pay. Who were the actors involved? Apart from government representatives, a small group of legal experts and liberal economists played an important role. Women had no access to the negotiations, and the few men genuinely protesting the widespread discrimination of women workers, such as the Dutch MP Gerard Nederhorst, were silenced (van der Vleuten 2007, 50–52).
It was thus in 1957 that the foundations for greater gender equality were laid down and a first institutionalised link was made between women's rights and employment rights at the European level, which would carry on to play out in the course of European gender equality history (Debusscher 2015). Although a market-making logic prevailed, the question of 'what kind of social policy was appropriate to what kind of economic union' was debated during the negotiations and would continue to be in the years that followed (Hoskyns 1996, 45). This duality between the economic and social interpretations of the European Community would later be reflected in on-going contests between and within the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, and between employers and employee representatives.
Although the Treaty contained a clear deadline for the implementation of Article 119, before moving to the next stage of the customs union, the principle of equal pay continued to be contested by experts (almost all male), employers, governments, and trade unions (van der Vleuten 2007). In spite of the commitment of some officials in the Directorate-General of Employment and Social Affairs (DG V), such as Jacqueline Nonon, the European Commission did not undertake any action beyond data collection because it did not want to spoil its relationship with the Council of Ministers on this topic (van der Vleuten 2007). Meanwhile, in 1965, in order to increase its budgetary authority, the European Commission was quite willing to risk this relationship. Its proposal for the financing of the common agricultural policy resulted in a constitutional crisis. After this debacle, the European Commission became even more wary of pursuing social policy initiatives (Hoskyns 1996).
Article 119 remained a dead letter until, in the wake of broader social unrest, working women started to protest their inferior position (van der Vleuten 2007). Indeed, the end of the 1960s was increasingly characterised by a disjuncture between the experiences of women workers on the one hand and the principle of equal pay on the other. The first activist event took place in 1966, when more than three thousand women workers from an arms factory in Herstal, Belgium, went on strike to protest unequal pay. The strike only brought about partial success, but it had a significant symbolic value and inspired others to take action (Gubin 2007).
One of these inspired minds was the Belgian lawyer Éliane Vogel-Polsky, who was convinced that women should be able to claim rights directly under European law. She asserted that Article 119 should be self-executing, similar to other (market-oriented) Treaty articles (Gubin 2007; van der Vleuten 2001). Vogel-Polsky and her colleague Marie-Térèse Cuvelliez prepared three 'test' cases based on the complaints of Gabrielle Defrenne. Defrenne was a former air hostess of the Belgian national airline Sabena, who in accordance with company policy, had been fired on her fortieth birthday, while male stewards could continue working until the age of fifty-five. Vogel-Polsky and Cuvelliez lost the first and third cases, but they won the second one. It was in this landmark decision that, in 1976, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) established the direct effect of Article 119 on equal pay for equal work. From that moment on, Article 119 could be directly invoked by women against their own government as well as against employers (Chrystalla 2003).
EQUAL TREATMENT AND THE DIRECTIVES ORIGINATING FROM ARTICLE 119 (1969–1978)
Of course, the events which brought Article 119 to life did not come about in a vacuum. The student upheavals in 1968, the wider calling into question of established norms, and the protests by different social movements created a context in which political change was demanded. The rise of the educational level of women as well as their massive entrance in the labour market cultivated a stronger political consciousness. This period witnessed the rise of the women's liberation movement across Europe, including more radical forms of feminism and public activism involving the younger generation. At the same time, the shift in women's voting behaviour weakened the position of conservative governments. Governments came into power based on their promise to take demands for social reform and women's rights seriously (van der Vleuten 2007). This can be understood as a critical juncture as it set in motion the destabilisation of institutions which, until then, had established politics as a male domain, prioritised a neoliberal market logic, and defended the interests of male breadwinners.
Consequently, in the early 1970s, the Council of Ministers agreed to develop social policy at least to the extent that it was recognised to be necessary to obtain popular and parliamentary support for achieving an economic and monetary union (van der Vleuten 2007). The European Commission seized this opportunity to give equal rights a prominent place in the proposal for a social action programme and prepared a draft directive on equal pay. To use directives in the social domain was new, but given its strong treaty base, equal pay was an excellent candidate (van der Vleuten 2007). The Commissioner of Social Affairs, Patrick Hillery, aimed to embed European social policy in a broader agenda including the fight against poverty and the combination of work and care (van der Vleuten 2001). However, although he tried to reassure his colleagues by pointing out that 'the only aspects of caring which could be considered were those which directly affected women working outside the home' (Hoskyns 1996, 102), any proposals which did not fit the market logic, for instance concerning paid maternity leave, parental leave, and childcare, were rejected at an early stage (van der Vleuten 2007). Hillery left the Commission frustrated in 1976 with a 'somewhat pathetic valedictory message,' as his Director-General Michael Shanks referred to Hillery's follow-up document for the Social Action Programme (Shanks 1977, 382).
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