Female Participation to Labor Markets and the Role of Policy Measures in Local Performance

The economic conditions of working women have lately been substantially improving in many aspects and across several countries. As a first consideration, one of the new positive aspects is the increased opportunities women are being granted to access the labor market, supported at several levels by public policies. At the European Union (EU) level, for example, in 1999, the guideline on “gender mainstreaming (GM) approach in implementing the guidelines across all four pillars” was incorporated in the 1997 European Employment Strategy (EES) in order to allow for more integration in gender issues. This meant extra consideration of gender effects in all policy measures undertaken. Of course, the situation of European women has improved on average, but quite a few countries still experience substantial discrimination in access, which is not sustainable in the long run. The target of GM is to boost female participation in the labor market and to remove all existing obstacles to its implementation by taking into consideration the impact on gender of every policy in every sector. However, the gender issue is far from resolved, from the EU to the local level. On the contrary, after the mid-term evaluation (2003), pillar IV on “equal opportunities” disappeared, and was replaced by a single more general guideline (one out of ten, the “10 commandments”) on equal opportunities. The EU’s attention then shifted to “employment issues” as a whole, rather than to gender balanced employment more specifically. This was mainly due to the unfavorable economic context, especially in the labor market. The effect is clearly seen in the new “streamlining” of EES and in the reinforcement of three overarching objectives of full employment, quality, and productivity at work, and social cohesion and inclusion. Gender equality was no longer included in the guidelines, though GM remained as a general principle. Many stakeholders and analysts (Rubery et al., 2006; JER, 2007; CEC, 2008) have attributed this to the decision to consider GM so absorbed by all EU members as to be redundant, if it were explicitly adopted in further policy measures. The GM approach, much to the advantage of total employment measures, has therefore started to be less and less visible, and this could be understood within a general slowdown of the already difficult process of catching up by female workers.