A Mountain Skyline. Gender Equality and Intersectionality in Supranational 'Equality CSOs'

This chapter explores the interface of civil society organizations (CSO) and EU institutions as a basis for supranational intersectional policy-making by focusing on “equality CSOs” – those organized around Article 19 of the Lisbon Treaty which provides the legal ground for combating discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. In 2010, the responsibilities for designing, steering and coordinating (gender) equality policy were moved from DG Employment to DG Justice. I examine how this institutional change affects networking among equality CSOs, more specifically, how equality CSOs' networks are formed, how they address gender equality and how they foster intersectionality in their networks. I claim that in this context equality CSOs’ access is almost always hierarchically organized along class – gender – race (in the order mentioned) and CSOs also (re)organize themselves according to this hierarchy. In order to explore networks among equality CSOs I use Qualitative Network Analysis (QNA) embedded in expert interviews.