Women’s absence from corporate boards has quickly become the centerpiece of the EU gender equality policy, overshadowing long-standing gender equality issues such as women’s under-representation in political decision-making and violence against women. The European Commission’s draft directive on gender balance on corporate boards, adopted in November 2012, is the first new EU-level legislative initiative in the field of gender equality for almost a decade.
In this paper, I examine the discoursive process that preceded the adoption of the draft directive at the European Commission. In this process, the gender equality problem of women’s under-representation in economic decision-making was redescribed as the economic problem of underutilization of women’s skills hindering economic growth and competitiveness of companies. Also the meaning given to gender equality shifted: the issue of women’s equal voice and representation turned into the concern for equal opportunities in career advancement. These shifts in framing are connected to conceptual changes: the feminist vocabulary of “unequal under-representation” has been replaced with the language of “gender imbalance,” which does not imply injustice or inequality.
The proposed directive and the efforts of NGOs and other actors to support it provide an excellent example of the marketization of gender equality policy and feminism.
