How Do Member States Legislate Equality Files in the Council of the EU? The Cases of the Pay Transparency and Anti-Violence Directives

The Council of the European Union is arguably the most powerful yet the least-known of European Union (EU) institutions. Despite being the ultimate power player in equality politics, its internal practices and processes have been rarely researched from the point of view of their genderedness or their significance for advancing gender equality in the union. The key objective of this paper is to start addressing this research gap. The paper takes as its starting point the contradictions that marked equality politics during the 2019-2024 legislative term. The period witnessed both advances in gender equality policy under the first von der Leyen Commission’s agenda of Union of Equality as well as strong contestations by increasingly powerful anti-gender actors present in the Council through national governments. The aim here is to examine how the nexus of institutions, actors, and discourses within the Council balance its politics in terms of the impact of the controversies to enable gender policy-making. The paper applies process-tracing to key policy documents around two recently adopted directives: the pay transparency directive and the directive to combat violence against women and domestic violence and draws upon 15 research interviews conducted with key actors involved in the negotiations. We research the following questions: How do the institutions, actors, and discourses in the Council enable compromises and balance conflicts in gender policy-making? How do the established norms and practices in the Council of the EU insulate it from the impact of radical right populists? The paper will draw upon and develop theories of gendered diplomatic practices in the Council as well as feminist institutionalism when addressing the research questions.