Double-Speak: The European Union and Gender Parity

Abstract

Ideas about pursuing a more equal balance between men and women in decision-making bodies and ‘parity democracy’ have been promoted by both the Council of Europe and the institutions of the European Union for nearly 20 years. In the early 1990s, the institutions of the EU played an important role in providing a platform for discussion and debate and thus brought these notions into mainstream political discourse in some of the member states. In response, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, several member states implemented policy to encourage more balanced participation for men and women in national and sub-national decision-making bodies. However, despite its own policy statements to the contrary, the EU decision-making bodies themselves remain male-dominated. This article asks how the EU on the one hand provided an impetus for some of the member states to take action to increase gender balance in decision-making while, on the other hand, its own institutions have remained largely unchanged.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jocelyne Praud and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. Any omissions or errors are, as always, my own.

Notes

1. There are some differences among authors who theorise about quotas, although these are generally premised on some form of difference and special treatment. For more detail on this, see Diaz (2005).

2. At least six member states (Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, France, and Italy) have set binding quotas for representation to the European Parliament.

3. Other political parties have also played an important role. The French Socialist Party, for example, had been advocating some form of quota since the late 1970s.

4. Some authors claim that the German Greens coined the phrase ‘parity’ to refer to equal representation between men and women (Scott 2005, cited in Krook 2007).

5. Section 3 of this document reads: ‘Calls upon the institutions and bodies of the European Communities: (a) to implement measures, in their capacity as employers and on the basis of a review, promoting the balanced recruitment of men and women and, inter alia, by promotion and training action, enabling balanced participation in the decision-making duties to be achieved; (b) to evaluate the results thereof periodically and have them published’ (Council 1995).

6. The six states are Sweden (47 per cent), Finland (42 per cent), Denmark (29), Netherlands (39 per cent), Spain (36 per cent), and Belgium (35 per cent).

7. Emanuela Lombardo (2005) documents the exact proportion of women in this body in February 2003. ‘Women comprised only 20 percent of the representatives of the heads of state or government of the member states (3 of 15), 10 percent (3 of 30) of the representatives of national parliaments, 0 percent (0 of 2) of the representatives of the European Commission, 31.25 percent (5 of 16) of the representatives of the European Parliament, 30.77 percent (4 of 13) of the representatives of the governments of accession countries, and 11.45 percent (3 of 26) of the representatives of the national parliaments of accession countries'. Clearly these figures are nowhere near the level of representation necessary for parity. For a more detailed breakdown of the convention members based on sex, see Léon et al. (2003).