by Sophie Jacquot
UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles
In my recently published article in Policy & Politics, I ask how and why equal pay remains on the EU agenda, and, relatedly, if policy failure can be useful in policymaking.
Equal pay for equal work between women and men has been enshrined in European treaties since 1957. It is one of the EU’s founding principles, and, even though the EU’s action against gender inequalities has expanded to include areas as varied as domestic violence, integration of gender equality in external relations, gender budgeting or the articulation between private and working life, equal pay certainly remains the flagship and most symbolic policy domain of the EU gender equality policy. Equal pay can be considered as an identity marker for the EU. Implementing the principle of equal pay has regularly been on the European policy-making agenda since the 1970s with new legislation, case law, soft regulation, etc. However, the gender pay gap in the EU is 13% in 2022. It means that women would need to work 1.5 extra months to make up the difference. It also means that progress in closing the gender pay gap is extremely slow: it decreased by only 2.8% pp in 10 years.
Source: Extract from Equal Pay? Time to close the gap! (European Commission, November 2022, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2022-11/equal_pay_day_factsheet_2022_en_1_0.pdf). Reproduction allowed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Given these (poor) results, the EU equal pay policy could be assessed as a failure and its existence questioned. But, on the contrary, the EU equal pay policy seems unaffected by failure. Recently, the von der Leyen Commission has put equal pay at the heart of the Union of Equality programme and has proposed a Directive on pay transparency, which was adopted on 10 May 2023. My recent article “Can failure be useful in policy-making? The case of EU equal pay policy” explores this paradox: Why and how, despite repeated implementation failure, is the EU equal pay policy still up and running?
My analysis focuses both on the long-term of EU equal pay policy-making since 1957 and on the case study of the implementation of the 2006 Recast Directive which contained measures aimed at promoting equal pay in practice. It shows that characterising the EU equal pay policy as exceptionally difficult to apply in practice is almost as old as the policy itself. This failure framing has been particularly present in the debates over the implementation of the Recast Directive, especially since this frame has been corroborated during the same period by the quantitative and symbolic strength of the gender pay gap’s percentage. My article argues that this framing performed important political and analytical functions. Most importantly, building on the idea of the failure of the implementation of equal pay allowed it to remain a persistent item on the EU agenda. In this sense, failure can be instrumental in terms of policy change, whether in times of high or low politics. However, such a strategy which relies on the acknowledgement of failure as an incentive for continuous action will certainly be increasingly put to the test at a time when EU decision-making is being progressively politicised, polarized and contested.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Jacquot, S. (2024). Can failure be useful in policymaking? The case of EU equal pay policy. Policy & Politics, 52(2), 200-218 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000031
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:
Andrews, R. (2023). Do women leaders of nonprofit public service organisations help to reduce the gender pay gap?. Policy & Politics, 51(2), 206-230 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16753329868574
Caravantes, P., & Lombardo, E. (2024). Feminist democratic innovations in policy and politics. Policy & Politics, 52(2), 177-199 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000009
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 