This paper addresses the logic underlying the three types of gender quotas to be found: those applied to politics, advisory boards and business, in order to theorise the similarities and differences in regulating gender relations. To this end we study the various gender quotas that have been adopted in Belgium over time: the 1990 law adopting gender quotas for federal advisory boards and its successor in 1997; the 1994 law adopting gender quotas for electoral lists of candidates and the 2002 successor laws; the 2011 law adopting gender quotas for boards of listed and state owned companies; and the 2012 law doing so for the board of the Belgian technical cooperation of development cooperation. The Belgian context is interesting in that it is one of the very few countries having adopted all three types of gender quotas. This allows for a comparative analysis of gender quotas while keeping background variables, such as political institutions, processes and procedures, the landscape of political actors, the gender regime, women’s participation in political decision-making or the labour market, etc, constant. For each of these six cases the gender quotas regulations and the parliamentary debates preceding their adoption will be analysed in order to study the similarities and differences in their regulation of gender relations.
