So, what’s going on with Poland? A discussion of the resistances and blockages in the implementation of gender equality policies in Eastern Europe

Following the ‘successful democratic transformation’ and over a decade of European Union membership, Polish politics and society at large have not managed to produce more equal gender relations. Despite having adopted the anti-discrimination rules and gender mainstreaming principles required in the acquis communautaires, structural and symbolic gender inequalities and sexist stereotypes pervade institutionally and discursively. The question then remains: what happens with the gender equality policies after adoption in the Eastern EU member states? On the example of Poland and taking into account the specific post-socialist legacies, I argue that the ‘democratization’ and the Europeanization processes that culminated in EU accession, have only been a case of swapping one type of proclaimed prima facie gender equality policy for another. The acceptance, transposition into national law, and implementation of the EU acquis concerning gender equality have been merely skin-deep and, once codified, seemed to be a ‘done deal’ that needed no further work. While EU accession brought expectations in terms of gender equality and the effects of gender mainstreaming both from the Polish (feminist) side as well as from the EU institutions, it has not yet been fully researched why Poland (and the region as a whole) is falling back in terms of progress on gender equality implementation. My paper is an attempt to fill in a part of this gap. By looking at the evolution and workings of the government post of the plenipotentiary for equal treatment (since its creation in 2001 and until its scrapping in early 2016), I trace the implementation of gender equality policies and show the complex position of an East-Central European state in the processes of Europeanization and soft norm diffusion. I also specifically discuss the newly elected Polish parliament and government, which have actually been successfully mainstreaming anti-gender equality rhetoric. I argue that the ambivalent position of the previous governments in terms of their commitment to implement gender equality policies has paved the way for the current dismantling of the already weak institutional guarantors of anti-discrimination and equality.