Gender Equality and Corporatist Governance in the European Union: Social Partners Negotiating Economic and Social Rights

The aim of this paper is to analyze gender and power in EU policy-making from an underresearched and undertheorized perspective: the role that social partners play in either advancing or blocking gender equality concerns at the transnational EU-level. The EU opened a new playing field for corporatist actors in relation to gender equality through the practice of ‘social dialogue’. The peak organizations representing labour and management have exerted power in relation to directives directly relevant to gender equality including those on pregnant workers and parental leaves. As a result the member state labour market organizations operate not only at the national but also at the international level in a process that has attracted little scholarly attention to date in gender studies. In this paper, we will analyze three case studies: the European Semester; the Social Rights Pillar, and the initiative on work-life balance that replaced the withdrawn maternity leave directive. One of the analyzed processes (work life balance) is directly linked to gender equality policy, and in the Social Rights Pillar gender equality has been visibly present since the beginning. The third process (ES) related to the economy has potentially significant effects on gender equality in member states, but the gender equality dimension is only superficially present and the gender equality content is declining. We will map out the gender equality positions and discourses of employers’ and employees’ organizations at the EU level to discern the role and impact that they have had. We build towards a theory of reconfigured corporatism that incorporates the connections between contemporary corporatism, gender and power on the one hand, and neoliberalism and transnationalism, on the other.