The profile of gender equality issue attention in Western Europe

Gender equality has attracted increasing political attention in Western Europe since the 1980s and a wide set of issues have come onto the agenda, including political representation, violence against women, equal pay, reproductive rights and equality in the family. Nevertheless, gendering policy still presents puzzling patterns in Western Europe that the paper aims to explain. The extent to which policies are gendered varies greatly. To take full account of the heterogeneity of gender equality policies, this paper argues that one should distinguish between class-based policies, status policies and blueprint policies. Indeed, the mechanisms through which gender equality policies gain advocacy and get upon governmental agenda differs according to the type of gender equality policies. Gender equality demands reflect very different issue agendas invoking very different constellations of interests, advocacy, friction and veto points which in turn play out differentially. Drawing on governmental attention datasets from the Comparative Policy Agendas Project, we take a comparative gender equality policy approach to assess the validity of several explanations (women in politics, social democratic politics, economic performance) with a systematic comparative quantitative analysis of the determinants gendering policy domains in Western Europe.