European Parliamentary Committees, Political Groups and the Implementation of Gender Mainstreaming

Since 2003, the European Parliament (EP) has adopted six resolutions – the most recent in January 2019 – and several reports on the strategy gender mainstreaming. The EP has also created practices to intervene in the everyday processes of EP committees, where the EP’s legislative work and negotiations between its political groups take place. All EP committees are obliged to implement gender mainstreaming in their committee work, devise a gender mainstreaming action plan, and assign a responsible committee member . In addition, the Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) participates in gender mainstreaming through its opinions and amendments for other Committees. In this paper we engage with recent approaches to analysing micropolitics and explore how they can be applied to studying the sub-sections (committees and political groups) in one major institution (the EP) by examining gender mainstreaming and opposition to its implementation. We are particularly interested in how political groups engage with gender mainstreaming in committee microcosms, and how practices within the committees and the political groups may advance or hinder the integration of gender perspectives in the EP’s policies in different policy fields. We build on a data set originating from the 8th and 9th EP legislature with 70 interviews with MEPs and members of staff from all of the political groups. In addition, we analyze EP and committee documents such as reports, action plans, and committee minutes to decipher micro-politics.