Contradictions and misalignments in the EU approach towards the gender pay gap

The aim of this paper is to highlight the tensions within the EU’s ‘governance architecture’ concerning pay equality. Specifically, after a preliminary outline of the theoretical discussion on the EU’s new/old governance, the analysis focuses on two empirical fields. The first one enables an assessment of the contradictions between old and new governance in EU equal pay policy. This analysis highlights the inconsistencies between the architecture of the antidiscrimination framework, established following the EU’s old governance-by-law approach, and the assessment of equal pay public policy measures in the context of the EU’s new governance-by-numbers approach. To this extent, the problems related to the political use of the unadjusted gender pay gap (GPG) indicator are pointed out. The second empirical field enables an assessment of the tensions within the EU’s new governance system itself, specifically between the approach in the area of equal pay and in the area of economic policy, with specific regard to the participatory role of the social partners in tackling the GPG. If the role of the social partners is emphasised in several policy documents, the potentialities of their action are seriously jeopardised by the push for decentralisation of collective bargaining, aimed at anchoring wages to productivity, fostered by the EU’s governance reforms responding to the crisis, in particular by the Euro Plus Pact and by the ‘six-pack’ regulations of 2011. As the paper finally remarks, both empirical fields of investigation confirm a narrowing down of pay equality in the context of an EU flexibility-centred and neoliberalist political perspective.