Negotiating Gender Equality: Constraints to Policy Change in the Council of the European Union

The Council of the European Union has historically served as a focal point of resistance to policy change in the domain of gender equality. The recent adoption of several gender equality directives under the ordinary legislative procedure presents an opportunity to examine Council decision-making through a gender-sensitive lens. This paper investigates the conditions under which feminist demands are translated into EU law, asking: Who exercises feminist agency in Council negotiations, and who resists change? When and why do opposing member states shift their positions? How do gender identities interplay with the negotiations, and how do gender equality values interact with the Council’s informal norms? Combining insights from liberal intergovernmentalism, neo-institutionalism and feminist institutionalism, I use process-tracing to analyse three recent legislative files: the Pay Transparency Directive, the Directive on Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, and the end of the negotiations of the long-contested “Women on Boards” Directive. The study draws on Council documents and semi-structured interviews with experts directly involved in these files. Findings highlight how the European value of gender equality shapes a logic of appropriateness without significantly influencing the outcomes of the negotiations: member states do not want to be perceived as opponents of gender equality, prompting them to carefully justify their position—particularly on contentious issues such as the inclusion of a criminal definition of rape in the Directive on Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. Path dependencies, including the limitations of the Treaty base and member states’ reluctance to amend it, restrict the possibilities of policy change considerably, despite feminist agency’s endeavours to bend or stretch legal bases. Interviewees’ perceptions reveal that gender identity and substantive representation matter in negotiation dynamics within the Council; how exactly this plays out should be investigated further. The analysis confirms the European Parliament’s role as a persistent advocate for gender equality. Its sustained efforts to extract concessions from the Council have contributed to the (partial) inclusion of feminist demands into EU secondary law, such as the concept of “intersectional discriminations” in the Pay Transparency Directive.