REFLECTIONS ON GENDER MAINSTREAMING: AN EXAMPLE OF FEMINIST ECONOMICS IN ACTION?

This article reviews the experience of gender mainstreaming within the European Employment Strategy - an experience that merits evaluation not only for what it has and has not done for fostering equal opportunities in Europe, but also for the implicit lessons it provides in applying feminist economics in practice. The experience has been mixed: though the argument that increasing women's employment is critical to the achievement of Europe's aspirations for a higher employment rate has been widely accepted, there is a much weaker and more fragile commitment to improving the quality of work available to women. In part, this limited impact reflects the continuing gender blindness of most employment policy analysis and development; there is a clear need for continued parallel development of feminist theory and analysis and more practical experiments in integrating a gender perspective into policy programs.