Varieties of Gender Regimes and Regulating Gender Equality at Work in the Global Context

Abstract

Globalization has been associated with economic neo-liberalism and deregulation. In the field of gender, however, new ‘soft forms of regulation’ towards gender equality have emerged in the context of globalization (cf. Lenz 2003a).¹ The most important are the UN norms established during the UN decade of women and the EU Directives on gender equality at work as well as the gender equality goal in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 (see below). Present research has concentrated on the roles of supra-national organizations, especially the EU, and of transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Walby 1999a, 2002b; Woodward 2004; Zippel 2004). The responses of governments and the effective results, however, have varied widely.