Introduction

Equal pay for women and men was adopted as a core principle of the European Union (EU) when it was founded in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, originally as the European Economic Community. The initial motivation for the inclusion of the clause was to protect against unfair competition in trade and the future significance of the inclusion of this principle was not anticipated or understood at the time. It was only in the 1970s that the EU began to develop a social policy programme and adopted gender equality as an explicit EU social objective, backed by new EU directives on both equal pay and equal treatment for women and men. In the 1990s, with the development of the European Employment Strategy (EES), there was a rediscovery of the potential importance of gender equality for all areas of EU policy, including economic and employment policy. Through the EES, the EU began to recognise that policies that take into account gender equality may have positive economic and employment outcomes as well as contributing to social justice and cohesion.

This recognition of the intertwining of gender issues with economic and social outcomes is associated with the development by the EU of gender mainstreaming as a policy approach. Gender mainstreaming involves the ‘(re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policy-making’ (Council of Europe, 1998, p 13). The immediate reason for introducing gender mainstreaming within the EU's employment policy was to demonstrate a commitment to action following the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, at which all United Nations (UN) countries, including the EU, agreed to introduce gender mainstreaming into policy development and analysis. However, increasing awareness that taking the gender impact into account in policy design could help the EU achieve its overall economic and social goals undoubtedly sustained the interest of the EU in gender mainstreaming, particularly in the EES, beyond the initial post-Beijing enthusiasm. At the summit in Lisbon in 2000 that established the Lisbon strategy to develop Europe into a productive and socially inclusive society (expanded through the 2001 Gothenburg summit to include environmental sustainability), an employment rate target for 2010 of 70% was set for the EU's working-age population.