Gender monitoring: A new mantra for more effectiveness in equal employment policy making? A cross-comparison

As vivid debates in many European countries and at the European level about the introduction of binding gender quotas in corporate boards of private firms but also at the top of public administrations recently showed: a certain dissatisfaction about the results of over three decades of “equal employment policymaking” (EEP) became louder in the general public, as the qualification level of young female workers slowly overruns its male counterpart, rendering durable employment inequalities (notably in terms of pay and career differentials) even more unacceptable. Confronted with the slow and somehow deceiving results of decades of policy activities, some gender experts have been long advocating a stronger monitoring or controlling of equal employment policy implementation, calling for the (further) institutionalization of a (regular) measurement and a broader publicization of EPP outcomes, so as to make the effects of political commitments more visible and comprehensible to the general public, that is rendering policymakers more accountable to their citizens. Far from being exclusively synonymous with the introduction of (neo-liberal) management principles in public policymaking, transforming gender equality into a quantified, statistically controllable, and instrumentalized commodity, as some gender experts argue (criticizing notably the European Employment Strategy), gender monitoring would rather represent a new quality of (evidence based) gender policymaking, adapted to the trans-sectoral nature of the policy field, counter-argue other experts. Opposing to a reduction of gender monitoring to the exclusive use of indicators, we define monitoring as a complex set of policy instruments endowed with a triple learning function – evaluating addressees’ compliance and policy outcomes, but also feeding problem analysis so as to adapt existing policy priorities and instruments, and finally informing the public and legitimizing policy activism. The use of indicators is still an integral part of monitoring but it is embedded in an institutionalized monitoring system, guaranteeing (ideally) the routinization of this learning loop. Adopting a post-adoption stance, we propose to analyse in a long-term perspective (over thirty years) the incremental development of monitoring structures in the field of equal employment policies in two national contexts, France and Germany, but also in two implementation sectors – national civil services and private firms, asking which types of instruments and indicators were chosen, which actors where commissioned to fulfill these monitoring tasks, through which channels information was communicated and to whom (addressees, policy community, general public). Based on primary sources (official documents and reports, minutes of parliamentary debates, etc.) and secondary sources (academic literature), this explorative cross-comparison evidences power structures that limited purposefully the monitoring of equal employment policies, giving way to durable implementation deficits – the recent introduction of new quota laws in both countries representing a political momentum for a re-launch of existing monitoring systems, but rather on a symbolic modus.