From Equal Treatment to Gender Mainstreaming and Diversity Management

Abstract

If you were a Belgian married woman in 1957, you could not have your own bank account or own property without having titles co-signed by your husband. You just recently started to vote since suffrage rights were first given to women in 1948. If you worked, not only would your salary not go into your personal account, but it would have been significantly lower than that of a man. It would be very unlikely that you had been to university: as late as 1960, women comprised less than 10 per cent of all university students. Your working life would have been shorter, since women were required to retire at 60. Even though the United Nations (UN) established a Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 and the UN Declaration of Human Rights reaffirmed the promise of equal rights for men and women in 1948, most European women remained second-class citizens.