Gendering Employment Policies in France and Germany: The Relevance of a Cognitive Analysis of the Implementation Process

Gender mainstreaming was introduced in the 1990s by the European institutions as a new approach for gendering public policies. It was notably applied in the employment sector. Several contributions have emphasized the inclusion of a gender perspective in the guidelines of national employment policies, but the concrete modalities of change in the implementation of these policies in the member states remain partially unexplored so far. We intend to explore why and how the gendering of employment policies has been implemented at the local level in France and Germany. The focus is put on policies aimed at activating the long term unemployed in two quite different regions of these countries, as far as the institutionalization of the gender issue is concerned. The methodology is based on an analysis of a set of qualitative interviews with professionals in charge of the implementation of policies and on the analysis of grey literature documents. Our analysis shows that these policies are characterized both by a process of change and by forces of inertia as far as gender issues are concerned, and reveals the relevance of a cognitive approach to understand this process. On one hand, the local projects for equality in policy employment are led by “advocacy coalitions” on both territories. On the other hand, the majority of street-level-bureaucrats remain, on both territories, reluctant to integrate a gender perspective because this goal has no particular legitimacy for them. This lack of legitimacy is related to their little knowledge about the gender aspects of the integration in the labour market.