Harvard Law School

Jean Monnet Chair
Professor J.H.H. Weiler

Harvard Jean Monnet Working Paper 2/00

Mark A. Pollack and Emilie Hafner-Burton

Mainstreaming Gender in the European Union

Harvard Law School    Cambridge, MA 02138

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Without permission of the author.

© Mark A. Pollack and Emilie Hafner-Burton 2000

Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
Mainstreaming Gender in the European Union

Mark A. Pollack and Emilie Hafner-Burton

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Political Science
110 North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706

Mark A. Pollack’s e-mail: 
Emilie Hafner-Burton’s e-mail: 

					

Paper prepared for presentation at the 12th Biennial Conference of Europeanists, Chicago, 30 March-2 April 2000.  Revised version to appear in the Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 7, No. 1 (September 2000).

	The European Union has long pursued a policy on equal opportunities for women and men, based originally on Article 119 of the EEC Treaty and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice, and more recently on a series of Directives on equal treatment for men and women in the workplace.  Yet the impact of EU equal opportunities policy on the women of Europe remains a bone of contention in the scholarly literature.  Simplifying only slightly, we can say that scholarly “optimists” view Article 119 and other elements of EU equal opportunities law as a new legal resource for European women, which creates legally enforceable rights to equal pay and equal treatment in the workplace and has been interpreted expansively by the European Court of Justice (cf. Stone Sweet and Caporaso 1996; Cicowski 1998).  By contrast, we can also identify a second literature, inspired by feminist theory and far more critical of EU equal opportunities policy.  In this view, European Union policy focuses narrowly on women as participants in the workplace, while ignoring the most fundamental aspects of women’s inequality in European society (cf. Rees 1998; Hoskyns 1996; Elman 1997).  In this view, EU equal opportunities policy represents at best a handful of Directives, most of which represent little or no real advance to most European women, and which in any event adopt a narrow, neoliberal view of women as participants in the workplace. 
	The starting point for this article is that both of these conceptions are correct: that is, EU equal opportunities policy has indeed pushed forward with an ambitious agenda of legally enforceable rights for European women, but that it has done so along the comparatively narrow, neoliberal front of workplace legislation.  From this starting point, however, we argue that the European Union has during the course of the 1990s begun to pursue a broader agenda, moving beyond its previous emphasis on equal treatment, to embrace both positive action and gender mainstreaming, with potentially important consequences for European women and for the European Union as a progressive polity.  First, with regard to positive action, the European Commission in particular has pressed forward with a series of specific, positive actions on behalf of women, both within and outside the workplace, ranging from child care and affirmative action to questions of women in leadership and violence against women.  Second, and parallel to these specific actions, the Union has recently adopted an official commitment to “mainstreaming” gender issues across all EU policies.  Although in its infancy, this gender mainstreaming approach holds the revolutionary promise of taking women’s issues out of a narrow policy community and inserting the concerns of women across the entire spectrum of EU public policies. 
	In this article, we examine and explain the expansion of the EU equal opportunities agenda, focusing primarily on the potentially revolutionary, yet little-studied, principle of gender mainstreaming.  
The article is organized into four parts.  In Part I, we introduce Rees’s three categories of equal treatment, positive action, and gender mainstreaming, arguing that the EU has in recent years adopted all three approaches in its equal treatment policy.  This expansion of the EU equal opportunities agenda, we argue, can be explained by the core concepts of social movement theory–political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and strategic framing–which we introduce briefly.  In Part II of the article, we turn to the official adoption of a gender-mainstreaming approach by the European Commission in 1996, arguing that the adoption of the new policy frame can be explained in terms of the increased political opportunities presented by the Maastricht Treaty and the 1995 World Conference on Women, the supranational network of women advocates at the EU level, and the resonance or fit of mainstreaming with the EU’s institutional structure.  In Part III, we move beyond the adoption of mainstreaming to examine its implementation across five issue-areas, and arguing once again that the cross-sectoral variation we observe can be explained in terms of the categories of social movement theory.  In Part IV, we conclude with a mixed assessment of both the promise and the dangers of the EU’s new gender mainstreaming approach.

I.  From Equal Treatment to Positive Action and Gender Mainstreaming

	In her landmark study of gender in EU education, training and labor market policies, Teresa Rees (1998) makes a useful distinction among three ideal-typical approaches to gender issues: equal treatment, positive action, and mainstreaming.  Equal treatment, in Rees’ words, “implies that no individual should have fewer human rights or opportunities than any other,” and its application in the EC context has taken the form of the adoption of Article 119 on equal pay for men and women, and the subsequent adoption of a series of Directives on equal pay and equal treatment in the workplace; and it is these Directives which have been activated by women litigants in the member states, and enforced by the European Court of Justice in the many equal-pay and equal-treatment cases since Defrenne (Rees 1998: 29).  Such an equal treatment approach is an essential element in any equal opportunities policy, Rees argues, but the approach is nevertheless flawed in focusing exclusively on the formal rights of women as workers, and therefore fails to address the fundamental causes of sexual inequality in the informal “gender contracts” among women and men” (1998: 32).
	In contrast to the equal treatment approach, Rees posits a second approach, called positive action, in which “the emphasis shifts from equality of access to creating conditions more likely to result in equality of outcome” (1998:34).  More concretely, positive action involves the adoption of specific actions on behalf of women, in order to overcome their unequal starting positions in a patriarchal society.  At the extreme, positive action may also take the form of positive discrimination, which seeks to increase the participation of women (or other under-represented groups) through the use of affirmative-action preferences or quotas (1998: 37). Since the 1980s, Rees detects a gradual move in the European Union away from a narrow equal-treatment perspective, and toward the adoption of specific, positive-action measures on behalf of women.  During the 1990s, this gradual acceptance of positive action has continued and indeed accelerated, as a result of three major policy initiatives. First, as Sonia Mazey (1995) has demonstrated, the European Commission has in recent years adopted a series of Action Programmes, which have fostered pilot projects and the exchange of best practices in areas such as child care and the political representation of women, as well as the creation of  networks of experts and advocates in women’s rights issues.  Secondly, the EU has recently witnessed a lively debate over positive discrimination, stimulated by the European Court’s decisions in the Kalanke and Marschall cases, and culminating in the reaffirmation of the member states’ right to adopt positive discrimination schemes under EU law (Ellis 1998).  Third and finally, the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty, with its pillar devoted to Justice and Home Affairs issues, has created the political space for a new and vigorous EU policy on violence against women, an area previously off-limits to the economically oriented European Community.  Taken together, these initiatives, although admittedly tentative, have allowed the EU to undertake concrete action in areas that fall well outside the narrow equal-treatment approach.
	In terms of Rees’ classification of approaches to equal opportunities, the third and most promising approach is gender mainstreaming.  By contrast with the positive action approach, which generally involves the creation of a specific organizational unit (such as the Equal Opportunities Unit in the Commission) and specific programmes for women (such as the four Action Programmes and their pilot projects), the concept of gender mainstreaming calls for the systematic incorporation of gender issues throughout all governmental institutions and policies.  As defined by the Commission, which adopted a formal commitment to gender mainstreaming in 1996, the term “involves not restricting efforts to promote equality to the implementation of specific measures to help women, but mobilising all generally policies and measures specifically for the purpose of achieving equality by actively and openly taking into account at the planning stage their possible effects on the respective situations of men and women (gender perspective)” (Commission of the European Communities 1996: 2, emphasis in original).  So defined, gender mainstreaming is a potentially revolutionary concept, which promises to bring a gender dimension into all EU policies, and hence to all women and men affected by those policies.  On the other hand, gender mainstreaming is also an extraordinarily demanding concept, which requires the adoption of a gender perspective by all the central actors in the policy process–including Commission Directorates-General, as well as sectoral Councils of Ministers, and member government officials who may have little experience or interest in gender issues. This raises two central questions for any student of gender mainstreaming in the EU: Why and how did the EU adopt a policy of gender mainstreaming in the first place, and how has it been implemented in practice?
	The answer to both of these questions, we argue, can be found in the recent literature on social movements, which emphasizes a combination of political opportunities, resource mobilization, and strategic framing in order to explain the rise of social movements and their impact on policy (cf. McAdam, Macarthy and Zald, eds., 1996; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 1998; and Tarrow 1998).  In terms of political opportunities, Pollack (1998) has argued that, despite the difficulties of decisionmaking in the Council and of implementation in the member states, the European Union nevertheless presents a favorable opportunity structure for diffuse interests such as women’s groups.  In particular, the EU provides multiple points of access to the policy process, and multiple allies among the European policymaking elite,  including: sympathetic member governments in the Council; the Equal Opportunities Unit within the European Commission, which is charged with preparing legislation and action programmes on sex equality issues; the Women’s Rights Committee of the European Parliament, which has acted as a steadfast and often radical advocate on women’s issues; and the European Court of Justice.  Furthermore, we argue below that the political opportunity structure of the European Union became systematically more favorable in the 1990s, as a result of the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in 1993, and the subsequent accession in 1995 of three new member states with a long-standing commitment to sexual equality.  These changes in the political opportunity structure, we argue, explain much of the recent broadening of the EU women’s rights agenda. 
	Political opportunities, however, are not sufficient to ensure the emergence of a social movement and the achievement of its substantive goals.  The ability of social movements to organize and to influence policy, rather, is dependent in part upon mobilizing structures, defined as “those collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and engage in collective action” (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996: 3).  In the case of the European Union, we argue that specific supranational actors–including most notably the Equal Opportunities Unit of the Commission and the Women’s Rights Committee of the European Parliament–form the heart of a transnational network of experts and activists in the area of equal opportunities, and that these networks have succeeded in placing on the agenda a wide range of issues previously beyond the scope of EU policymaking.
	Finally, in addition to political opportunities and mobilizing structures, social movement theorists have focused increasingly on the importance of framing processes, understood as “the conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action” (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996: 6).  The concept of strategic framing was first applied to the study of  social movements by Snow and his colleagues, who argued that social movement organizations may strategically frame issues in order to resonate or “fit” with the existing dominant frames held by various actors, who are more likely to adopt new frames that are resonant, rather than in conflict, with their existing “dominant” frames (Snow and Benford 1992: 137).  In a similar vein, Rein and Schon have applied the concept of framing to the study of public policy, arguing that policymakers are guided in their work by what the authors call a “policy frame,” defined as “a way of selecting, organizing, interpreting and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading, and acting” (1993: 146).  
	In the EU case, we argue, following Sonia Mazey (1998), that gender mainstreaming has emerged during the 1990s as the dominant policy frame for equal opportunities policy in the European Union.  The acceptance and implementation of gender mainstreaming, however, depends in practice on the resonance or “fit” between the proposed policy frame and the dominant frame(s) of the EU institutions, most notably the Commission and its various Directorates-General.  In this regard, Anne Sisson Runyan has examined the international political activities of women’s NGOs, arguing that these groups are condemned to operate within a dominant neoliberal frame emphasizing individual rights, capitalism, and the rule of law (Runyan 1999: 212).  While we agree with Runyan about the importance of the neoliberal frame, we resist positing neoliberalism as the single, all-embracing “master frame” of the international community.  Rather, we suggest that both individuals and organizations can be placed along a continuum in terms of their support for either a neoliberal frame, with its emphasis on individuals and free markets, or a more interventionist frame, which accepts the intervention of states and international organizations in the marketplace in pursuit of social goals, including the goal of sexual equality.  Indeed, we shall argue below that the Directorates-General of the European Commission vary considerably in their placement along this continuum from neoliberalism to interventionism, and this variation in turn explains much of the variance in the response of various DG’s to the Commission’s gender-mainstreaming mandate of the late 1990s.

	II.  The Origins of Gender Mainstreaming in the EU

	The concept of gender mainstreaming effectively entered the mainstream of international public policy in September of 1995, when it featured in the Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, which defined the term broadly and committed the institutions of the UN system to the systematic incorporation of a gender perspective into policymaking (Hafner-Burton and Pollack, forthcoming).  The concept of mainstreaming gender into public policymaking, however, pre-dates Beijing by at least a decade, having been developed with the UN development community in the decade after the 1985 Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as in the domestic policies of several Northern European countries, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway.  The term first entered European Community parlance in 1991, when it appeared as a relatively small but innovative element in the Third Action Programme on Equal Opportunities, but the concept remained unrealized during the Third Programme itself (1991-1996).  During this period, the Commission undertook specific sectoral initiatives on behalf of women, and participated actively in the preparation for the Beijing Conference, where it endorsed the principle of gender mainstreaming on behalf of the EU (Commission of the European Communities 1995).  Despite these tentative efforts, no effort was made during the Third Action Programme to create a bureaucratic structure across the Commission capable of introducing a gender perspective into all EU policies, and even the Structural Fund initiatives of this period fell short of a comprehensive incorporation of gender in all EU funding (Commission of the European Communities 1996: 16).
	The key year for the adoption of gender mainstreaming, rather, was 1995, when the political opportunity structure of the Union, which had always been relatively open to women’s groups, became even more so, as a result of several events.  First, the new Santer Commission was appointed from an expanded pool of member states, including three new members (Sweden, Austria and Finland) with a strong existing commitment to equal opportunities, and with considerable experience in mainstreaming gender in their own public policies.  Furthermore, the Commission nominees from the new member states–and in particular Commissioner Erkki Liikanen of Finland and Anita Gradin of Sweden–demonstrated keen interest in the equal opportunities portfolio which had been held in the previous Commission by the Social Affairs Commissioner, Padraig Flynn of Ireland.  As a result of these changes, and of the nomination choices of existing member governments, the incoming Santer Commission contained a record five women, and an increased interest in and commitment to equal opportunities.  Indeed, at the insistence of the new Scandinavian and women Commissioners, Santer agreed to establish a new “Commissioners’ Group” on equal opportunities, consisting of Flynn, Liikanen, Gradin, and the new German Commissioner in charge of the Structural Funds, Monika Wulf-Mathies (Palmer 1994).
	A second change in the political opportunity structure took place in November 1993 with the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty.  Although the Treaty did not expand EU competence for equal opportunities policy, it did provide for a major expansion of the power of the European Parliament, which had long acted as one of the primary advocates of a more forceful EU policy on women’s issues.  In addition to creating a new co-decision procedure for certain areas of legislation, the Treaty also granted the Parliament the right to vote on the nomination of the incoming Santer Commission–a power which the Parliament used forcefully, scrutinizing individual Commissioners in public hearings, and pressing the priorities of its members, including equal opportunities for women and men.  Most importantly for our purposes, the Women’s Rights Committee of the Parliament sharply criticized the returning Commissioner Flynn for his alleged lack of progress on women’s issues in the Delors Commission, and for his earlier comments about Irish President Mary Robinson, and demanded that Santer take the equal opportunities portfolio away from Flynn in favor of another Commissioner with a stronger record on equal opportunities.  Fearing that any concession would be seen as a sign of weakness, Santer refused to take the portfolio away from Flynn, but in a gesture to the Parliament announced that his Commission would devote significant attention to equal opportunities, and that Santer himself would chair the proposed Commissioners’ Group.  
	Thus, thanks to the changing political opportunity structure of the Union, and the mobilization of equal opportunities advocates in the newly empowered European Parliament, the new Santer Commission came into office in 1995 with a new Commissioner’s group on equal opportunities, and a clear mandate for a major initiative in the area.  The substance of the Commission’s initiative, finally, was provided by the “policy frame” of gender mainstreaming–which as we have seen was already familiar to the Equal Opportunities Unit of the Commission, and which was given a major boost by the public adoption of mainstreaming as a key element of the Beijing Platform of Action.  This mainstreaming frame, moreover, “resonated” within the Commission as a whole, which possessed prior experience with the integration of another consideration–the environment–across all issue-areas.  In late 1995, therefore, the Commission proposed, and the Council adopted, the Fourth Action Programme (1996-2000) on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, which featured mainstreaming as the single most important element, alongside existing specific actions.  In February 1996, the Commission officially declared its commitment to mainstreaming with a new Communication entitled, “Incorporating Equal Opportunities for Women and Men into All Community Policies and Activities,” which committed the Commission to the mobilization of all Community policies for the purpose of promoting gender equality (Commission of the European Communities 1996).
	Finally, the Union’s new approach to equal opportunities was both reflected and strengthened by the terms of the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which includes multiple new provisions strengthening EU competence in the area of equal opportunities.  In place of the original, one-paragraph Article 119 on equal pay, the member states agreed to a new Article 119 (now renumbered Article 141), which strengthens the original language on equal pay; provides for qualified majority voting in the Council, and co-decision with the European Parliament for future equal opportunities legislation; and contains a specific clause permitting states to maintain positive discrimination policies in light of the Kalanke and Marschall rulings.  In fact, the effect of the New Article 141 is unlikely to be felt in the short-term, since the Commission has no immediate plans to propose new legislation under Article 141, and the new positive-discrimination clause in Article 141(4) arguably restates the Court’s post-Marschall jurisprudence.  In this regard, the most far-reaching provisions in the new Treaty may be the revisions to Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty, which make equal opportunities for women and men–and not simply equal pay or equal treatment in the workplace–a central objective of the Union, which it will henceforth strive to incorporate into all EU policies.  These articles are not directly effective, and do not create legally enforceable rights for European women, but they do represent a Treaty-based political commitment to gender mainstreaming which the Commission has cited as both legal authority and “political cover” for its subsequent proposals.   In order to secure the adoption and implementation of specific policies, however, the EU would have to mobilize, not merely the traditional network of women’s advocates surrounding the Commission’s Equal Opportunities Unit, but the entire policymaking machinery of the Union.  It is to this challenge that we now turn.

 III.  Implementing Mainstreaming: Piercing the Needles’ Eyes

	In their critical review of EU equal opportunities policy, Ilona Ostner and Jane Lewis (1995) argue persuasively that any gender-related policies at the European Union level must pass through two “needles’ eyes” in order to be discussed, adopted, and implemented: a first needle’s eye at the level of the Union, with its narrow conception of equal opportunities in terms of equal treatment and its stringent requirement of consensus in the Council; and a second needle’s eye in the variable implementation of EU legislation in the “gender order” of each individual member state (Ostner and Lewis 1995: 161).  Although we have argued above that the Union has begun to move beyond the equal-treatment perspective, with its neoliberal emphasis on women in the workplace, Ostner and Lewis are correct in pointing to the institutional and ideological obstacles in the path of a successful mainstreaming policy.  Indeed, we would suggest that there are not two but three institutional needle’s eyes through which gender mainstreaming must pass: (1) the supranational level of the Commission bureaucracy, in which the majority of Directorates-General have little or no experience in adopting a gender perspective; (2) the intergovernmental level of the Council, where any proposed policies must garner a qualified majority or even a unanimous vote among the member governments; and (3) the member-state level, at which both binding and non-binding EU provisions are implemented according to the “gender order” of each respective member state.  To what extent has the Union been able to overcome these three hurdles and institute a real policy of gender mainstreaming in the four years since the Commission’s 1996 Communication?
	It is, of course, early days for gender mainstreaming in the European Union, and so any assessment we might offer in this context must necessarily be tentative, relying primarily on procedural changes within the Commission, somewhat less on official policies which have only begun to emerge, and least of all on the record of national implementation, where little or no data is yet available.  Nevertheless, on the basis of an exhaustive review of primary documents and interviews with Commission, Parliament, and member-state officials as well as NGO representatives, it is possible to review (a) the Commission-wide procedures put in place thus far to ensure that a gender perspective is indeed considered in the planning and implementation of all EU policies; and (b) the preliminary record of EU successes and failures in mainstreaming gender into both procedures and policies across five specific issue-areas.  We consider each of these, briefly, below.
1.  Commission procedures for gender  mainstreaming
	In order to succeed, the policy of gender mainstreaming must reach out beyond the core of equal opportunities advocates in and around the Equal Opportunities Unit, incorporating in the first instance officials from other policy areas and other Directorates-General.  As Sara Nelen points out in an early review of EU mainstreaming, the methodological requirements for gender mainstreaming are quite demanding, including the appointment of key officials responsible for the overall mainstreaming strategy; the provision of training in gender issues for other officials whose substantive expertise lies elsewhere; the collection of statistics and other data disaggregated by sex, to be used in planning, monitoring and evaluating the effects of policy on gender inequality; and other specialized techniques such as “gender proofing” and “gender impact assessment” (Nelen 1997: 43-48; see also Council of Europe 1998; Rees 1998; Hafner-Burton and Pollack, forthcoming).  Recognizing these demands, the Commission has set out during the late 1990s to establish centralized coordination, a network of gender advocates and experts across the various DG’s, and explicit methods to guide officials in the implementation of gender mainstreaming across all policy areas. 
	First, at the highest level, the Santer Commission established the aforementioned “Equality Group of Commissioners” chaired by Santer and featuring Commissioners Gradin, Wulf-Mathies, Liikanen, and Flynn as regular members (with other members free to attend depending on the subject matter under discussion).  The Commissioners’ Group met only three times a year during the Santer years, and its actual impact on policymaking is the subject of debate among Commission participants, but in principle it provides both a high-level commitment to the principle of mainstreaming and centralized coordination of gender in all EU policies.
	Below the level of the Commissioners’ Group, two inter-service groups were established in 1996, the first devoted to equal opportunities in general, and the second on equal opportunities within the Structural Funds (which, as we shall see, were selected as a test case for the new mainstreaming approach).  At a lower level, a group of “gender mainstreaming officials” has been appointed within each of the Commission’s Directorates-General and Services: these officials serve both to represent a gender perspective in their respective DG’s, and to coordinate policy with the other mainstreaming officials in the group (Commission of the European Communities 1998a, 1998b).  In addition, many DG’s have appointed, in addition to their gender mainstreaming official, a number of gender “focal points” to provide decentralized gender expertise at the level of the unit, although the training of these officials varies considerably both within and across DG’s.  Finally, in a preliminary effort to provide specific instruction regarding the procedures for integrating gender into EU policymaking, the Equal Opportunities Unit prepared a “Guide to Gender Impact Assessment,” providing officials with a basic checklist for the inclusion of gender issues in any proposed policies (Commission of the European Communities 1997b).  
	Thus, by the end of 1999, the Commission had established a multi-tiered system of mainstreaming officials and a preliminary set of general procedures designed to ensure that gender issues are considered throughout the policy process, and across the various issue-areas and Directorates-General of the Commission.  Throughout its preliminary communication and in subsequent work, moreover, the Commission has made clear that the mainstreaming of gender issues throughout the Commission should supplement, and not replace, the kinds of specific actions for women considered above.  Indeed, in all of its proposals and communications, the Commission has made a point of pursuing a so-called “dual-track strategy,” mainstreaming gender across the policy process while maintaining specific actions on behalf of women.  However, the extent to which these procedures actually become part of the day-to-day policymaking of individual Directorates-General–and the extent to which gender issues actually pierce the various needle’s eyes of the Commission, Council, Parliament, and member state implementation–is less clear.  It is to this more difficult question that we turn in the next section.
2.  Mainstreaming EU Policies: Five Case Studies
	Thus far, we have dealt with the European Commission as a unitary actor, participating alongside the European Parliament and Council of Ministers in the EU policy process, and we have characterized the Commission or even the Union as a whole in terms of its political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and dominant frames.  In order to explain the considerable variation in the implementation of gender mainstreaming across issue-areas, however, we need to disaggregate the Commission into its constituent Directorates-General and Services, which are responsible for the formulation of policy in various issue-areas, and which differ considerably in the political opportunities they offer to women’s advocates, the networks that mobilize to take advantage of those opportunities, and the dominant frames that characterize the different DG’s and define their respective missions.  In terms of the social-movement model specified above, we would predict that the implementation of gender mainstreaming should be most advanced, in terms of both procedures and policy, where the political opportunity structure is the most open, where the networks of gender experts and advocates are most developed, and where the policy frame of mainstreaming resonates or fits with the organizational culture of individual Directorates-General.  All of these factors vary among the various issue-areas and DG’s of the Commission.
	In the following pages, we review the evidence of gender mainstreaming in procedure and in policy across five issue-areas and five Commission Directorates-General: Structural Funds (led by Regional Policy and Cohesion, the former DG XVI);  Employment and Social Affairs (formerly DG V); Development (DG’s VIII and IB); Competition (DG IV); and Science, Research and Development (DG XII).  In terms of dominant frames, the first three of these DG’s have historically been interventionist in character, and relatively open to consideration of social justice issues, including gender.  By contrast, the remaining two Directorates-General, Competition and Research, are oriented primarily toward market or technical criteria, and have considerably less experience dealing with gender issues; and we would therefore expect these two DG’s to be less receptive to the gender mainstreaming frame.  As we shall also see, however, the advocates of gender mainstreaming have proven adept in strategically framing the issue in order to fit with the dominant frame of a given DG, most often by emphasizing the gains in efficiency (as opposed to equality) that are likely to be realized if and when gender is taken into account across the policy process.  In addition, the five issue-areas examined below differ significantly in terms of mobilizing structures of gender advocates outside the organization, and perhaps more importantly in the presence or absence of elite allies within the relevant DG’s who have in each case played a central role in framing the gender mainstreaming mandate and carrying out its implementation. 

	Structural Funds.  The European Union’s Structural Funds–composed of the European Social Fund, the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee and Fund, and the European Regional Development Fund–were created individually over the decades since the adoption of the Treaty of Rome, and were managed by three distinct Directorates-General (Employment and Social Affairs, Agriculture, and Regional Policy and Cohesion, respectively) until 1988.  In that year, the Delors Commission proposed, and the member states adopted, a major reform of the Structural Funds, which provided for a doubling of their overall budgets in real terms between 1988 and 1993, while at the same time bringing the three existing funds under a common set of Regulations, and creating a new set of Community Initiatives adopted solely by the Commission, and reflecting European as well as national priorities (Yuill et al. 1998: 90-95). These 1988 Regulations have since been revised twice: in 1993, when the budget was once again doubled in real terms, and the terms of the Regulations were adjusted somewhat to increase the influence of the member governments vis-á-vis the Commission; and in February of 1999, when the European Council adopted the so-called Agenda 2000 package, which stabilized Structural Fund budgets roughly at existing levels, while introducing additional administrative reforms to the Fund Regulations.
	In terms of the three criteria identified by social movement theory, the Structural Funds might be expected to be particularly receptive to the Commission’s new gender-mainstreaming mandate.  First, with regard to political opportunities, the Structural Funds afforded women’s advocates multiple points of access and elite allies among the three Directorates-General, including the presence of two members of the Commissioners’ Group, Padraig Flynn and Monika Wulf-Matthies, who were strong champions of the Commission’s mainstreaming mandate.  Furthermore, surrounding these DG’s there already existed a well-developed network of women’s activists across the EU’s member states, many of whom had already begun to participate in EU structural policy through the partnership provisions of the 1988 reforms (Braithwaite 1999).  Finally, in terms of their dominant policy frames, all three Directorates-General involved in the implementation of the Funds can be placed toward the interventionist end of the continuum discussed above, given their concerns for social justice as well as for economic efficiency, and their pioneering role in the creation of specific, positive actions for women, such as the NOW (New Opportunities for Women) Initiative of the early 1990s, which provided 156 million ecus of funding to promote equality for women on the labor market (Commission of the European Communities 1998e: 18-19).  
	For all of these reasons–and because the Regulations governing the administration of the Structural Funds were scheduled for renewal in 1999, providing a timely window of opportunity–the Commission decided to make the Structural Funds a test case for its new gender mainstreaming mandate.  In March of 1998, therefore, after a major Commission effort involving officials from multiple DG’s and gender experts brought in as outside consultants, the Commission produced a draft set of Regulations for the period from 2000 to 2006, which effectively mainstreamed gender considerations across every aspect of the EU’s structural operations.  The proposed Framework Regulation contained ten substantive articles laying down specific requirements for the integration of a gender perspective at every major stage in the policy process, including: the general objectives of the Funds; ex ante evaluation of the situation in a given region in terms of equality between women and men; an assessment of the likely impact of proposed programmes on women and men in a variety of areas; the provision of statistics broken down by sex wherever possible; the “balanced participation” of women and men on all monitoring committees; and a requirement for the Commission to refer specifically to gender issues in its triennial reports on the implementation of the Funds.  In addition to these far-reaching provisions, the specific proposals for the ERDF, Social Fund and EAGGF Regulations included specific wording making the removal of gender-based inequalities a core objective of each respective fund (Commission of the European Communities1998e: 14-15; and Braithwaite 1999).
	Although potentially controversial in their potential impact on the member states, the Commission’s proposals were supported by extensive technical documentation, and were preceded by widespread consultation of numerous Commission DG’s and member-state representatives.  Throughout the drafting and negotiation of the new Regulations, moreover, the Commission consistently framed the question of gender mainstreaming as a question of efficiency as well as social justice.  This framing is perhaps best summarized in a January 1999 report produced for the Commission by Mary Braithwaite.  In the report, Braithwaite writes that:
The integration of equal opportunities into the Structural Funds is not only for reasons of social justice and democracy.  The main aim of the Structural Funds–to reduce economic and social disparities and to establish the conditions which will assure the long-term development of the regions–depends upon the fullest participation of the active population in economic and social life.  Failure to overcome the constraints to the equal and full participation of women and men means that the development objectives of growth, competitiveness and employment cannot be fully achieved, and also that the investments made in human resources (e.g. in raising educations and qualification levels) are not exploited efficiency (1999: 5).

Here most strikingly, we see the Commission’s effort to frame its gender-mainstreaming proposals strategically, to appeal to officials and political representatives concerned with economic efficiency rather than, or in addition to, social justice and gender equality.  This strategy, which has also been found in several previous studies of gender mainstreaming at the World Bank and other international development organizations, was consciously designed to enhance the resonance or fit of the gender mainstreaming frame with the existing policy frames of a wide range of supranational and national officials, and would be adopted again by the Commission in other issue-areas, as we shall see presently (see e.g. Kardam 1991; Hafner-Burton and Pollack forthcoming).
	Largely as a result of this careful preparation and strategic framing on the part of the Commission, the gender provisions of the new Regulations provoked little negative reaction or debate within the Council of Ministers, which adopted the new Regulations in June of 1999, with only marginal changes.  At the level of policy, therefore, the 1999 Structural Fund Regulations represent the first major breakthrough for the Commission’s mainstreaming mandate.  The extent to which individual member states and regions implement these provisions in their programming documents, and in individual development projects, remains to be seen as the new Fund Regulations are put into effect over the period of 2000-2006.

	Employment Policy. The issue of employment has traditionally been the primary responsibility of member states, with at best a modest and indirect supporting role for the European Union.  By the mid-1990s, however, the member governments, faced with double-digit unemployment rates, agreed to coordinate their employment policies, and in 1997 they inserted a new Employment Title into the Treaty of Amsterdam.  According to the new title, employment would remain the primary responsibility of member governments, but a “high level of employment” was recognized a Community objective, and a new procedure was established for the annual adoption of a series of Employment Guidelines by the Council, followed by the submission of National Action Plans (or NAPs) by the member states, which would then be analyzed by the Commission and the Council in their annual Joint Employment Report. Although clearly non-binding, this annual exercise of setting joint guidelines and analyzing national reports was seen as a sort of “peer-pressure” exercise, in which member states be encouraged to address the EU guidelines and adust their policies in response to common EU priorities and the views of their counterparts in other member states. 
	The sudden adoption of the new Employment Title and its implementation in late 1997 created an unexpected window of opportunity for the Commission’s gender mainstreaming mandate.  Under the new provisions, the key role in preparing the new Employment Guidelines, analyzing the NAPs, and issuing recommendations would be played by the Directorate-General for Employment and Social Policy, whose Commissioner Padraig Flynn and Director-General Alan Larsson were deeply involved in, and supportive of, the Commission’s gender mainstreaming policy.  In addition, the DG was also home to the Equal Opportunities Unit, and therefore had access to the Unit’s extensive gender expertise and advocacy.  The dominant frame of the Directorate-General, finally, was clearly oriented toward social issues in general, and toward gender issues in particular, making the new Employment Title a particularly likely candidate for mainstreaming within the Commission.
	In this context, the Commission came forward in October 1997 with a draft Proposal for Guidelines for Member States’ Employment Policies, 1998, in which it made established four lines of action or “pillars” to guide member state policies on employment: entrepreneurship, employability, adaptability, and equal opportunities for women and men.  Under each pillar, the Commission’s Communication  provided a brief introduction justifying the importance of the objective, followed by specific actions to be taken by member governments in the National Action Plans, and quantitative targets and indicators to measure member-state performance.  In the section on equal opportunities, the Commission began once again by presenting its proposals, not only as a matter of social justice, but also, or primarily, in terms of efficiency: 
There are sound economic and social reasons [it argued] for a reinforcement of efforts of Member States to promote equal opportunities in the labour market.  While the employment situation of women has improved over recent decades, unemployment is higher for women than for men (12.6% as against 9.7%) and their rate of participation in work is lower (50.2% as against 70.4%).  Within work, women are over-represented in some sectors and professions and under-represented in others.  These labour-market rigidities, which impede Europe’s capacity for growth and job creation, must be tackled (Commission 1997a: 16).			

Once again, the Commission’s language was clearly framed to ensure member-state acceptance of its specific proposals, which called for positive action in three areas: tackling gender gaps (through active state support for increased employment of women); reconciling work and family life (most notably by raising levels of child-care provision); and facilitating return to work by women after extended absence (by improving women’s access to vocational training).  Finally, the Communication proposed a weakly worded call for the mainstreaming of gender (or rather of women) across all of the guidelines (ibid).  Final adoption of the Employment Guidelines, however, fell not to the Commission, but rather to the Council of Ministers, which retained the three specific equal opportunities actions called for by the Commission, but weakened the wording of several provisions, and eliminated entirely the Commission’s proposed paragraph on the mainstreaming of gender in the other three pillars (Council of Ministers 1997).  
	Despite this setback, the Commission continued in its efforts to encourage the effective implementation of the equal opportunities guidelines by the member states, which submitted their first National Action Plans in April of 1998.  Although the member states had clearly been required to draft their plans hastily, the Directorate-General for Employment undertook an extensive study of the NAPs, with a strong focus on their gender aspects.  On the whole, the Commission’s initial response to the NAPs was positive, noting that all of the member states seemed committed to the goal of reducing unemployment.  Nevertheless, the Commission pointed out bluntly in its initial assessment that the equal opportunities pillar was the least well-developed of the four pillars in most reports, with very few concrete measures proposed (Commission of the European Communities 1998c).   In addition, a detailed internal Commission study found that many of the NAPs demonstrated a rhetorical commitment to the principle of equal opportunities, but varied in the pervasiveness of a gender perspective, as well as concrete policy proposals and indicators for monitoring implementation (Commission of the European Communities 1998d). 
	Responding to these results, the Commission in September of 1998 issue new proposals to the Council for the 1999 version of the Employment Guidelines.  Noting the importance of consistency from year to year, the Commission proposed to leave the guidelines largely unchanged, with the same four pillars and only minimal changes to the wording of the individual guidelines.  Notable among these proposed changes, however, was a long and detailed reference to the principle of mainstreaming, which would be added as a fourth priority under the equal opportunities pillar.  Although the member states had rejected a considerably weaker draft provision the previous year, in 1998 the Commission enjoyed decisive support from the successive British and Portuguese Presidencies of the Council.  During the first half of the year, the British Presidency explicitly endorsed the principle of mainstreaming, which was inserted for the first time into the Presidency Conclusions of the June 1998 Cardiff European Council.  The Austrian Presidency during the last half of the year was an equally strong supporter, and chaired the negotiation of the 1999 Employment Guidelines, the final version of which retained, unchanged, the Commission’s extended discussion of gender mainstreaming, including the core commitment to “adopt a gender-mainstreaming approach in implementing the Guidelines of all four pillars.  In order meaningfully to evaluate progress on this approach, Member States will need to provide adequate data collection systems and procedures.”  The Council also accepted more precise language regarding the other three priorities of the Equal Opportunities section (Council of the European Union 1999b).  Finally, the Vienna European Council also called on each of member states to draft new NAPs by June of 1999, for examination and peer review by the Commission and the Council.  
	In the area of equal opportunities, and more generally, the Commission’s review of the 1999 NAPs was much more thorough, and its report more specific and more critical, than the previous year’s review.  In its draft proposals for the annual Joint Employment Report, submitted in September of 1999, the Commission systematically analyzed each member state’s NAP, noting strengths and weaknesses in specific proposals, and commenting explicitly on the presence or absence of a gender-mainstreaming perspective in the various NAPs, which ranged from a detailed and comprehensive approach by Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France–which was singled out for praise after developing specific, quantitative indicators for gender issues in response to previous Commission criticisms–to a less detailed approach by countries such as Italy, Ireland, and Greece, which proposed specific actions in some areas but failed to mainstream gender throughout their employment plans (Commission of the European Communities 1999c).  
	In addition to this detailed analysis, the outgoing Santer Commission decided, for the first time under the new Treaty provisions, to issue specific recommendations for the member states’ employment policies.  At the urging of Commissioner Flynn, the Commission issued a total of fifty-six recommendations to all fifteen member states, including a number of gender-specific recommendations to countries as diverse as Greece, Italy, and Ireland (all of which were urged to strengthen the gender mainstreaming approach in their NAPs) and Finland and Sweden (which were praised for their gender-mainstreaming approaches but urged to reduce the segregation of women workers in traditional sectors of the labor market) (Commission of the European Communities 1999d).  Although several member governments criticized Flynn regarding the accuracy of the Commission’s criticisms, and insisted that his successor Anna Diamantopoulou engage in more extensive consultation prior to publishing recommendations in the future, the Council nevertheless accepted 53 of the Commission’s 56 recommendations, and ratified the Commission’s general call for greater mainstreaming of gender issues across all four pillars of the Employment Guidelines.
	Finally, in December 1999, the Council agreed yet another set of Employment Guidelines for 2000, with equal opportunities provisions almost identical to those of the previous year.  Once again, member states will be called upon during 2000 to draft new National Action Programs, which will be expected to address the gender-mainstreaming provisions of the new guidelines.  Whether this exercise will matter–whether it will actually influence policy outcomes in the member states–remains to be seen in the coming years.  Nevertheless, it is striking that several member states (most notably France) have already made a deliberate effort to integrate gender issues more clearly into their National Action Programs in response to Commission and Council criticism, one need not be the victim of Commission propaganda to appreciate the transformative potential of subjecting national employment policies to an annual, and potentially critical, analyses from a gender perspective.  

	Development.  The European Union in 1997 provided over 4.6 billion in official development assistance to countries in nearly all regions of the world, making the EU the fifth-largest donor in the OECD, and the second-largest multilateral donor in the world after the World Bank.  Over the course of the 1990s, an increasing share of EU aid has gone to the newly democratized states of the former Soviet bloc, to countries of the Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean (the ALA-MED countries), and to disaster relief through the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO).  By far the oldest and most important development activities of the Union, however, are those established by the 1957 Treaty of Rome to assist the group of former European colonies now collectively known as the African, Caribbean and Pacific (or ACP) states.  Since 1963, the Union has reached regular association agreements (known collectively as the Lomé Conventions) with the ACP countries, extending preferential trade access, guaranteed minimum prices for core commodities, and development aid through the European Development Fund (EDF).  The planning and implementation of EDF is aid involves multiple offices within the European Commission, but is concentrated primarily in the Directorate-Generals for Development (former DG VIII, dealing with APC countries) and External Relations (former DG IB, which is responsible for the ALA-MED countries) (Development Assistance Committee, 1998).
	EU development policy presents a mixed picture from the perspective of social movement theory.  In terms of dominant frame, we might expect the Directorate-General for Development to be a prime candidate for mainstreaming, thanks to its prolonged exposure to Women-in-Development (WID) issues in the international development community.  Over the course of the 1980s, the Commission had participated in various UN and World Bank meetings on Women-in-Development, established its first part-time WID desk (in 1982), issued its first WID communication (1985), and incorporated short WID paragraphs in the third and fourth Lomé Conventions (1984 and 1989).  A decade later, however, the political opportunities for mainstreaming in EU development policy still seemed unfavorable, for three reasons.  First, despite repeated pleas from the European Parliament, which created a dedicated budget line for WID in 1990 and increased its allocation in subsequent years, the Commission was slow to develop gender expertise, and its two WID desks (in Development and External Relations) remained understaffed and underfunded, receiving little support from Development Commissioner Joao de Deus Pinheiro, who failed to make gender issues a priority during his tenure.  Second, such gender expertise that did exist was concentrated largely in the WID desks, and did not extend to the general operations of the EDF, which undertook no systematic gender evaluations of its lending prior to 1995 (Development Assistance Committee 1996: 44).  Thirdly, the actual operations of the EDF are highly decentralized, and so mainstreaming would require an extensive effort to develop procedures and training and disseminate these not only throughout the relevant Directorates-General in Brussels, but also to EU delegations all over the world, which would in turn be required to bring recipient governments on board.  Under these daunting circumstances, the primary advocates of WID and Gender-and-Development (GAD) approaches generally concentrated their efforts on other international lenders such as the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank (Hafner-Burton and Pollack 2000).
	Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 provided a new impetus for the mainstreaming of gender issues in the EU development lending.  In 1995, the Commission proposed, and the Council adopted, a non-binding Resolution on the “Integration of Gender Issues in Development Cooperation,” which called explicitly for the training of Commission officials and the creation of new tools and procedures for integrating gender into EU development activities, and which once again adopted the language of efficiency, pointing out that the EU would not achieve its development objectives for the APC countries unless it made full use of the economic potential of the women as well as the men in those countries.  Three years later, in May 1998, the Development Council adopted a binding Regulation on the same subject, providing a clear legal mandate for Commission activities in this area, funded by a WID budget line that grew to 5 million euros in 1997, divided evenly between the Development and External Relations DG’s (Council of Ministers, 1998b).  
	Since 1995, both DG’s have increased the number of  personnel assigned to gender issues, and have established networks of gender focal points in 26 units of the Development DG, and three units of External Relations, supplemented by the use of external gender consultants both in Brussels and in the various EU delegations throughout the world.  In addition, both DG’s have gradually begun the process of developing specialized tools and instruments for gender issues, including a Gender Impact Assessment form in External Relations, and the creation of a Quality Support Group in Development to review all financial proposals over 2 million for attention to gender issues (Development Assistance Committee 1998: 34-36).  In 1999, the Directorate-General for Development drafted a detailed and comprehensive action plan for the mainstreaming of gender issues in development policy, including extensive training of Brussels and field-based officials; increased support and training to the gender focal points; the establishment of a “gender help desk”; creation of new guidelines and checklists; revision of the EU product cycle management manual; and establishment of specific indicators for the future monitoring of the gender aspects of EU development programmes and projects.  Finally, in February of 2000, the Commission and the representatives of the APC countries concluded a new, twenty-year cooperation agreement, which like its predecessors includes specific language on gender-and-development issues (Singh and Sarno 1999; Buckley and James 2000).   
	Despite these considerable strides in the last five years, both internal and external reviews of Commission development policy also point to substantial obstacles in the way of a successful mainstreaming policy, including the lack of gender awareness and expertise among EU officials in Brussels and in the field delegations; insufficient funding for gender training; the overwhelming dominance of male officials at the highest levels of the EU development bureaucracy; the need to develop new instruments and procedures; and the additional challenge of securing the cooperation of recipient countries.  

	Competition Policy.  In terms of the criteria proposed by social movement theorists, the Directorate-General for Competition does not, a priori, appear to be particularly fertile ground for the adoption of the Commission’s gender mainstreaming mandate.  By contrast with the DG for Employment and Social Policy, with its extensive equal opportunities networks and its links to the social partners, the Competition DG is characterized by a relatively closed policy process, in which private firms play a key role and few provisions are made for participation by consumer groups or other non-governmental organizations.  Perhaps for this reason, and because of the lack of any obvious implications of competition policy for women, European women’s groups have seldom mobilized around the issue of competition policy.  In terms of its dominant policy frame, the Directorate-General for Competition is among the most strongly neoliberal DG’s within the Commission.  Dominated by lawyers and economists, the Competition DG takes its decisions on state aids, cartels and concentrations, and mergers and acquisitions according to legal and economic criteria, with extraordinary autonomy from the political pressures of member-state governments, and sees its mission as the creation and maintenance of a competitive European marketplace.  For this reason, EU competition officials resist any suggestion from other DG’s or from the member states that they take into account nonmarket factors such as employment, industrial or social policies in their decisions (Cini and McGowan 1998).
	Not surprisingly, therefore, the Directorate-General for Competition is mentioned frequently by Commission officials as the most resistant of the Commission services to the gender mainstreaming mandate.  By contrast with the DG’s examined above–where resistance to mainstreaming is relatively rare, and typically takes the form of understaffing, underbudgeting, or insufficient training rather than active opposition–the Directorate-General for Competition has taken a principled stance against the integration of gender into its decision-making processes.  Specifically, in response to the call for individual plans for the mainstreaming of gender issues by the Equal Opportunities Unit, the DG argued that the Treaties provide no legal basis for it to take gender issues directly into account in its decisions, although there was some legal scope for the indirect incorporation of gender issues, insofar as the Commission’s state aids policy takes a favorable approach to national policies designed to help disadvantaged groups, including women, in the labor market.  In addition, the Directorate-General noted that state aids are not approved by the Commission if they breach any articles of the Treaty, including those on equal opportunities.  Overall, however–and despite the views of the Equal Opportunities Unit, which specifically mentioned the Amsterdam Treaty as the legal basis for mainstreaming gender across all issue-areas–the Competition DG has resisted suggestions that gender be systematically incorporated into its state-aids, cartel and merger decisions. 

	Science, Research and Development.  Since the early 1980s, the European Union has pursued an active policy to promote scientific research and development, most notably through a series of Framework Programs which sponsor collaborative research and technological development across a range of sectors.  The most recent of these, the Fifth Framework Programme (1998-2002) was adopted by the Council and the European Parliament in December 1998, with a budget of 14.96 billion euros to fund scientific research across a range of areas including information technology, nuclear and conventional energy, and the life sciences (Peterson and Bomberg 1999: 200-227).
	In the context of the current study, the Directorate-General for Science, Research and Development would not have appeared in the early 1990s as a particularly promising arena for the mainstreaming of gender in the EU’s policies for research and technical development.  In terms of political opportunities, the DG for Research had the smallest percentage of women among its senior or A-grade officials (7.6%) of any of the Commission services, providing few elite allies for advocates of gender mainstreaming.  Similarly, the two primary advisory committees of scientists established under the Fourth Framework Programme possessed a female membership of 6.7% and 0%  respectively (Osborn 1998: 87).  Outside these official committees, there were several European-level organizations of women scientists, and a number of national-level networks as well, but these groups had little access to decisionmakers in the DG prior to 1995.  In terms of its dominant frame, finally, the DG for Science, Research and Development, although not strictly oriented toward a neoliberal conception of the single European market, had traditionally awarded EU research grants strictly according to scientific and technical criteria, and has been resistant to the notion that these criteria might be compromised by any social considerations, including gender.  Put differently, the dominant frame of the organization emphasized scientific excellence at the expense of any and all social considerations in the awarding of research grants, and thus encouraged a consistent and deliberate policy of gender-blindness in EU research and development policy prior to the late 1990s.  
	In practice, however, this gender-blindness meant that the overwhelming dominance of men within the scientific community was reproduced in EU research policy, in which Commission officials, advisory committee members, and recipients of EU research grants were overwhelmingly male.  During the early 1990s, the Commission took a few initial steps toward addressing the dearth of women scientists in EU programs, including a small 1993 conference on women in science, which put forward recommendations designed to improve the collection of statistics on the participation of women scientists in EU research programs, and to encourage women scientists to apply for EU funding.  Furthermore, the Fourth Framework Program (1994-1998) placed a strong emphasis on socioeconomic research into quality-of-life issues, which might have been used to support gender-specific studies.  Nevertheless, as Hilary Rose (1999) points out, these early efforts had little if any impact on policy during the Fourth Framework Program, which made no explicit mention of gender issues, and which failed even to collect any European-level statistics on the participation of women scientists in EU research programs.
	Nevertheless, despite this apparently unpromising fit between the Research DG and the proposed policy frame of gender mainstreaming, the political opportunity structure of research policy became markedly more favorable for advocates of gender issues during the mid-1990s, for several reasons.  First, within the Commission, a central role was played by Edith Cresson, then the Commissioner in charge of Research and Development as well as a member of the Commissioners’ Group.  Although not herself a leader on women’s issues, Cresson provided encouragement and support to advocates within her cabinet and in the services of the Directorate-General for Science, Research and Development, where a working group on women and science was created in late 1997, with four full-time officials working on the program by 1999.
	In addition, the EU’s Fourth Framework Program came up for renewal in 1998, providing a new opportunity to amend its procedures, and a unique opportunity for the members of the European Parliament, who would participate in the adoption of the program by co-decision with the Council of Ministers.  The Parliament had been an early advocate of integrating women in EU research and development programs, and women MEPs lobbied the Commission to adopt a more active policy on women in science.  In 1998, the Parliament criticized the Commission’s 1997 proposal for the Fifth Framework Program for its failure to include any significant language on gender mainstreaming or women in science.  Although the Parliament was unable to secure the adoption of significant changes in the final text of the Framework Program, its lobbying–together with that of non-governmental organizations like Women’s International Studies Europe (WISE) and the European Women’s Lobby–created additional pressure on the Commission, and provided support for advocates of gender issues inside the Commission.  
	Taken together, these developments created another window of opportunity for the advocates of the Women and Science program, which was inaugurated with a major conference in April 1998, followed by a formal Commission communication in February of 1999.  The Commission’s communication, entitled Women and Science:  Mobilising Women to Enrich European Research, began with a detailed analysis of the systematic under-representation of women in science, and the gender-based obstacles that women scientists encounter on the job market, in the peer-review system, and in being appointed to positions of responsibility and power within the scientific community.  Given these systematic biases against women in science, the paper argued, the aim of the program was not to compromise excellence in the pursuit of social justice, but rather to enhance the excellence of European science by removing barriers to participation by qualified women scientists–an efficiency-based argument which once again echoes the arguments made by women’s advocates in the structural policy, employment and development sectors above (Commission of the European Communities 1999b).  
	Against this background, the Commission proposed two key objectives for the new program.  The first objective was to stimulate European-level discussion and exchanges of experience among the member states regarding equal opportunities for women in science, in three stages.  First, in November 1998, the Commission established a group of experts, the European Technology Assessment Network, consisting of a dozen women scientists, to study the challenges and prospects for women’s participation in European research policy.  Second, the Commission then convened a standing group of national civil servants, who might share experiences and best practice in the development of indicators, assessment and monitoring of women’s participation in national and European research policy.  Third and finally, the Commission hosted a July 1999 meeting in Brussels entitled “Women in Science: Networking the Networks,” which sought to build transnational links among women scientists and increase their participation in the Fifth Framework Programme (ibid: 9-10).
	The second objective of the program was to develop a coherent approach to women and science within the Fifth Framework Program, in order to promote scientific research by, for, and about women.  The first of these criteria, research by women, featured the most ambitious proposals, designed to increase the number of women scientists participating in research sponsored by the Fifth Framework Program.  As a first step, the communication proposed the creation of a system of indicators to measure women’s participation in EU research projects, which had not existed during the Fourth Framework Program.  In addition, the Commission would take active measures to encourage applications from women scientists, and to encourage project coordinators to put together research teams that are balanced as regards gender (although the proposal stopped short of suggesting positive discrimination on behalf of women in the awarding of EU grants).  Perhaps most remarkably, the document proposed adopting a target of 40% participation by women at all levels in the previously male-dominated advisory committees, and the  Commission would report progress on this score in its annual review of EU research policy (ibid: 11-14).
	Now in its second year of implementation, and following the endorsement of the Council of Ministers in June of 1999, the Commission’s Women in Science program is one of the most ambitious, and one of the best-supported in terms of staff and budget, of any Commission initiative under the gender-mainstreaming mandate (Council of the European Union 1999a).  Although the program looks at first glance like the kind of women-only, stand-alone program that gender mainstreaming was designed to supercede, its essential goals–such as developing indicators of women’s participation in science, improving the gender balance of women and men in all EU research programs, and carrying out gender impact assessments of those same programs–are all compatible with the aims and procedures of gender mainstreaming, and promise to transform EU research and development policy in medium- to long-term future.

	Summing up this section, these five case studies, the results of which are summarized in Table 1, support two general conclusions.  First, the progress of gender mainstreaming has been variable across issue-areas, reflecting the considerable variation in political opportunities, mobilizing structures and dominant frames characterizing each issue-area and its respective Directorate-General of the Commission.  Secondly, however, the advocates of gender mainstreaming in each of these issue-areas have been sophisticated and strategic in their efforts to frame gender mainstreaming as an efficient means whereby officials in a broad range if issue-areas could achieve their goals in terms of employment, development, or scientific research.  The categories of social movement theory, therefore, provide us with a useful set of hypotheses about the structural conditions under which gender mainstreaming is likely to succeed; but it also points our attention to the key role of agency, and the ability of strategic actors to overcome structural obstacles through a skillful process of strategic framing.  We shall return to this point in our concluding comments below.

Table 1: Mainstreaming Across Five Issue-Areas
Issue-Area	Political Opportunities	Mobilizing Structures/Networks	Dominant Frame/Resonance of Gender Issue	Mainstreaming Outcome	
Structural Funds	Open (multiple access points; elite allies)	Well developed	Interventionist frame; experience with gender issues	Successful adoption of new Regulation, yet to be implemented	
Employment	Open (multiple access points, elite allies)	Well developed (large group of women’s networks around Equal Ops Unit)	Interventionist frame; Employment DG with primary responsibility for gender issues	Mainstreaming in 1999 Employment Guidelines	
Development	Moderate (multiple access points, but few elite allies in key positions; implementation highly decentralized)	Moderate	Interventionist frame; previous involvement in the international debate on women/gender in development	1998 Council Regulation; increased training, new procedures.  Action plan in progress.	
Competition	Closed (minimal participation by non-firm actors, few elite allies within DG)	Minimal (women’s NGOs inattentive to competition issues)	Neoliberal frame; deliberate effort to ignore social/industrial policy considerations	None	
Research	Open (multiple access points, elite allies)	Moderate (a few European-level groups, many national networks )	Dominant frame emphasizes technical efficiency, excellence.	Women and Science Programme	

	IV.  Conclusions
	During the past five years, the European Union’s approach to equal opportunities has been transformed, from a narrow focus on equal treatment in the workplace, to a gradual acceptance of specific, positive actions, and, since 1996, an institutional commitment to mainstreaming gender across the policy process.  Gender mainstreaming is, we have argued, a demanding strategy, which requires policymakers to adopt new perspectives, acquire new expertise, and change their established operating procedures.  In that context, it is not surprising that we find variation across issue-areas in acceptance and implementation of the EU’s gender mainstreaming mandate, reflecting the different political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and dominant frames that characterize each of the issue-areas examined above.  What is surprising, however, is the speed and efficiency with which the Commission has succeeded in introducing a gender perspective across a broad range of issue-areas, including four of the five cases studied here, and others (such as education and agriculture) beyond the scope of this study. Indeed, we would go so far as to suggest that, in terms of its procedures for gender mainstreaming as well as the development of gender-sensitive policies that are admittedly still in their infancy, the European Union is rapidly emerging as one of the most progressive polities on earth in its promotion of equal opportunities for women and men.
	Nevertheless, the gender mainstreaming approach is not without its dangers, and its critics, and we therefore end on a cautionary note, with three critical observations.  The first of these criticisms concerns the fear that a policy of gender mainstreaming will lead to the abandonment of specific, positive actions on behalf of women.  In the words of tentative supporter of the new approach, “If gender is everybody’s responsibility in general, then it’s nobody’s responsibility in particular.”  Specifically, critics of the new approach fear either that specific policies on behalf of women will be discontinued, or that the Equal Opportunities Unit, which has played a key entrepreneurial role in the development and management of the new mainstreaming approach, will itself be weakened in the name of mainstreaming.  Such a development would, in our view, represent a significant setback to the promotion of equal opportunities in the EU, and women’s advocates may therefore be expected to campaign for the retention of the Commission’s dual-track approach, and the maintenance of a central role for the Equal Opportunities Unit.
	A second criticism of the EU’s mainstreaming approach is that, thus far, many of the initiatives undertaken under its mandate fail to create and legally enforceable rights, such as the equal pay guarantee of Article 119, relying instead on untested administrative procedures and “soft law” proclamations that are likely to be felt unevenly, if at all, by the women and men of Europe.  This is a serious concern, and it is for this reason that the Commission has consistently proposed a mainstreaming approach, not as a substitute for equal-treatment guarantees or positive actions, but as a supplement to them.  More generally, we would argue that the greatest promise of the mainstreaming approach lies not in the short-term creation of legally enforceable rights, but in the long-term transformation of the EU policy process to serve the goal of equal opportunity between women and men.
	This brings us to a third and final criticism, raised by Rounaq Jahan, Teresa Rees and others, concerning the nature of a mainstreaming process which, according to Jahan, can take either one of two forms.  The first of these approaches, which Jahan labels “integrationist,” essentially introduces a gender perspective into existing policy processes, but does not challenge existing policy paradigms.  By contrast, a second and more radical approach, which Jahan calls “agenda-setting,” involves a fundamental rethinking, not simply of the means or procedures of policymaking, but of the ends or goals of policy from a gender perspective.  In this approach, “Women not only become part of the mainstreaming, they also reorient the nature of the mainstream” (Jahan 1995: 13).  As appealing as the latter approach may seem, we would agree with Rees (1998) that the European Union has generally adopted an integrationist approach to gender mainstreaming, integrating women and gender issues into specific policies rather than rethinking the fundamental aims of the European Union from a gender perspective.  Indeed, we would argue that the Commission’s  integrationist approach is the inevitable consequence of the strategic choices of mainstreaming advocates, who have consistently framed, and “sold,” gender mainstreaming as an effective means to the ends pursued by policymakers, rather than an overt challenge to those ends.  The EU agenda will, therefore, not be transformed overnight from a gender perspective, as feminists (including ourselves) might prefer.  Nevertheless, the social-movement framework adopted in this article suggests that the strategic approach adopted by mainstreaming advocates was a necessary one, and that a more radical approach would most likely have been rejected for its lack of fit with the existing views of EU policymakers.  Furthermore, we remain optimistic that, within individual issue-areas, the gradual introduction of a gender perspective into existing policies has the potential of transforming the discourse, procedures, and participants of both EU and, ultimately, national policies to the mutual benefit of the women and men of Europe.

References

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Buckley, Neil, and Canute James, 2000.  “Something for Everyone as ACP Lome Delegates Assess Deal,” Financial Times, 11 February, page 12.

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