What Kind of Mainstreaming? Assessing the Place of Gender in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum

Gender equality is considered a core value of the European Union by its founding treaties (TFEU, art. 8). Since the Treaty of Amsterdam, Gender Mainstreaming (GM) has been recognized as a pivotal policy tool to integrate gender perspectives into all policies. The literature, however, has identified a gap between the EU's gender equality rhetoric and its actual policies, particularly in gender-neutral areas and in its external actions (Lombardo & Meier, 2006; Minto & Mergaert 2018; Guerrina & Wright, 2016), with gender treated as a subset of human rights policy and mobilized for strategic and rhetorical purposes. Despite the growing number of studies investigating this problematic gap, external migration policy – i.e., all the matters related to externalization of borders and border control – remains a loud absentee in the literature, with few exceptions (Stachowitsch & Sachseder, 2019; Allwood, 2015; Welfens, 2020). Hence, as part of a larger project investigating the EU’s approach to GM in external migration policy, the objective of this paper is understand to what extent the 2024 New Pact on Migration and Asylum envisages a gender sensitive approach to migration. This is done through policy frame analysis carried on the New Pact’s legislative texts, employing a Diagnosing/Prognosis approach (Verloo & Lombardo, 2007; Bacchi, 2012). As GM is scholarly identified as an “empty signifier”, with potential for more or less transformative approaches (Lombardo & Meier, 2006; Meier, 2018; Walby 2005), the paper aims at uncovering if and how gender is conceptualized and problematized in the finalized version of the New Pact, and what solutions are suggested to this problematization in turn. Historically, external migration is a policy domain that has already put into question the notion of Normative Power Europe (Manners, 2002; Cusumano, 2018; Lavanex, 2018), with the Union's highlighted focus on border control and securitization. The issue of gender in this field has the potential to shed light on the EU’s newsest trend in migration management vis-à-vis competing polarizing issues for Member States – gender and migration alike - and current security concerns. Additionally, studying the new policy package from this perspective answers the need to bridge mainstream EU integration theories with feminist literature, in addressing both theoretical and societal shortcomings of EU’s migration policy.