Contested gender mainstreaming in the European Parliament: implementation, opposition and outcomes

The European Parliament (EP) has been a strong supporter of gender mainstreaming at European Union (EU) level, and it has also committed since 2003 to incorporating this approach in its own work and organization. Yet little is known about the implementation of and opposition to gender mainstreaming within this representative EU institution. Over the past 20 years, gender mainstreaming in the EP has become increasingly institutionalised. The main body responsible for implementing gender mainstreaming is the EP’s Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM), and new actors, including standing rapporteur(s) for gender mainstreaming and a gender mainstreaming network consisting of MEPs and staff from the EP’s committees have been established. Since 2011, the EP has undertaken regular assessments of its gender mainstreaming practices, tracking progress and making proposals for improvement. Since the 2009–2014 term, gender mainstreaming amendments (GMA) have allowed FEMM to introduce a gender perspective into reports of other committees on specific issues. The EP has also created practices to intervene in the everyday processes of the committees, where the EP’s legislative work and negotiations between the EP’s political groups take place. For instance, since 2016 the committees have been asked to devise a gender mainstreaming action plan. In this paper, engaging with feminist institutionalism and recent approaches to analyzing micropolitics, we examine the implementation and outcomes of gender mainstreaming in the EP as well as opposition to its implementation. We are particularly interested in how the EP’s key power players, its political groups, engage with gender mainstreaming, advancing or hindering its implementation. The paper asks: How do formal and informal institutions within the EPs committees and the political groups affect the implementation of gender mainstreaming? How does implementation differ between committees and policy fields? How and by whom is opposition expressed? We build on a data set originating from the 8th and 9th EP legislature with 134 interviews with MEPs from all political groups and members of group and EP staff. In addition, we analyze EP and committee documents such as reports, action plans, and committee minutes to decipher micro-politics.The paper shows large committee-specific differences in the implementation of gender mainstreaming, with specific fields like economic policy being particularly resistant to the integration of gender perspectives. The paper also argues that the EP’s political groups that negotiate and vote on the EP’s positions are key gatekeepers with powers to block gender mainstreaming efforts. Through exposing the critical role of party politics for gender mainstreaming implementation within the EP, the paper provides new insights for extant literature on gender mainstreaming that has tended to focus on civil servants and bureaucratic actors and shedding light on specific challenges to gender mainstreaming within parliaments.