Equality policies in the EU through a feminist historical institutionalist lens

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