Europe is a Woman. And What Does She Say about Men?

The European Union has been recognized as a leading actor in women’s empowerment and gender equality policy. Several recent studies underline the interaction of backlash against gender equality with Euroscepticism, more often expressed by men (e.g. Korolczuk and Graff 2018). This leads to questions about the causes of such combined backlash. In this paper, we ask how the European Commission describe men and whether men are seen as potential beneficiaries of European policies. This study relies on two data sources: the full dataset of 45 thousand press releases of the European Commission since 1985 and all gender equality strategies of the EU since 1982. They are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively with the conceptual lens of policy target populations (Schneider and Ingram 1993). As noted by feminist researchers of European integration, gender equality narratives are often reduced to the “women-as-victims” frame, while not mentioning men and not finding any role in the progress towards gender equality for them (e.g. Lombardo and Meier 2008). The existing research on men in the gender equality agenda of the EU has focused on problems with men (e.g. violence) and how men can contribute to gender equality (e.g. Hearn et al. 2021). In turn, we ask whether the EU recognizes men as a target population of the EU gender equality policies, not excluding a priori that they might be a direct beneficiary of such policies. This approach is motivated by the broader literature on bureaucratic reputation, which argues that bureaucracies selectively target audiences and may gain support of some by alienating others (Carpenter and Krause 2012) and by the literature on gender and European integration, showing that the Commission uses gender equality instrumentally, as a legitimatising tool (Elomäki 2015). We show that since 1990s, and particularly since 2008, gender has been successfully mainstreamed in Commission’s communication, appearing in up to 13% of press releases in 2018. This progress has helped in establishing women as a “deserving and politically powerless group” and allowed to broaden the spectrum of policies aiming at supporting women. However, it has also introduced the negative portrayal of men as a uniformly “non-deserving and politically powerful group.” The negative image of men excludes the possibility of creating policies targeted at men, unless their goal would be to help women. Our analysis of gender equality strategies shows how men’s problems are known to and mentioned by the Commission but not treated as worthy of targeted policies, even if the inequalities arise in unequal access to and use of EU programmes like Erasmus+. Our paper may also fit the section on Gender and Social Policy Reforms. Lombardo and Meier 2008, “Framing Gender Equality in the European Union Political Discourse” Carpenter and Krause 2012, “Reputation and Public Administration” Hearn et al. 2021, “EU, Men and Masculinities” Korolczuk and Graff 2018, “Gender as “Ebola from Brussels”: The Anticolonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism” Elomäki 2015, “The economic case for gender equality in the European Union: Selling gender equality to decision-makers and neoliberalism to women’s organizations”