The European Union and equal opportunities policies

The impact of the European Union policy on gender relations is often underestimated, while the significance of gender has often been underestimated in analyses of the EU. Yet the EU has made significant changes to the governance of gender relations. This has been significantly achieved through the legal regulation of equal opportunities in employment. This paper subjects to detailed critique those arguments that equal opportunities policies can do little to enhance the position of women. The impact of EU equal opportunities policies have been underestimated as a result of: the traditional focus of the social dimension on welfare rather than on social regulation; the theorization of gender relations through the lens of the family and welfare rather than employment, and the underestimation of the power of law.