"Is there a feminist perspective on the European employment strategy and guidelines?"

[T]his paper proposes that the ongoing critique of the EU can be taken forward and evolve in complexity by introducing further differentiations. Two new interlinked differentiations can be made, firstly, between EU institutions, such as Commission and Council, and between legislation and strategy. While the EU's gendered achievements in the field of employment legislation expanding the legal acquis have been recognized, the issue of gender in wider socio-economic strategies governed by intergovernmental bargains, such as the case of the European Employment Strategy, has as yet received little attention from researchers working from within a feminist perspective-apart from the scholars on gender and the labor market who have been involved with the Commission, such as the EGGE team and its EU country specialists, coordinated by UMIST. Is it safe to assume the supranational and the intergovernmental levels need a different toolkit of analysis? Perhaps by turning the spotlight on an intergovernmental bargain such as the European Employment Strategy, we can see how far the recognized "emancipatory value" of the EU project remains confined to the sphere of rights and regulation and fails to filter down to wider practical policymaking field, despite the best efforts of the Commission in adopting gender mainstreaming techniques