Women in Europe and in the world: The state of the Union 2016

Building on the definition of oppression developed by the philosopher Iris Young, the article argues that women in Europe are an oppressed group. Relying on recent statistics, it points out that a high percentage of women are still subject to gender violence; economically exploited and marginalized; powerless with regard to governance and participation in the public sphere, as well as victims of androcentrism—a pattern of cultural evaluation which seriously undermines women’s potential for development. The article then shows how this state of affairs has worsened over the last years, under the effects of the financial and economic crisis, and the austerity policies with which the European states have responded. Finally, it singles out two possible future scenarios. If the current neo-liberal trends persist, we can expect a move towards societies more polarized in terms of class and ethnicity; low fertility rates; and an increasing poverty of those most in need of care and in charge of care provision. The crisis could instead be perceived as an opportunity to diverge from this prevailing neo-liberal model, calling for a new, inclusive, societal model of development—a new humanism which puts the person, in her whole complexity and in her very real care dependent nature, at the very core of the political and economic project

“Notorious RBG”: A conversation with United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

On February 2, 2016, Prof. Ruth Rubio-Marín, Chair of Constitutional and Comparative Public Law at the European University Institute (EUI), interviewed the U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The interview took place in the framework of the European University Institute’s annual Ursula Hirschmann Lecture, a space dedicated to stimulate research and thinking which links ideas about Europe and the study of gender. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg engaged in a conversation that tackled her whole persona, without making rigid divides between the professional and the personal. Deep legal analysis, personal anecdotes, and invaluable advice for future researchers and lawyers intertwine in the interview, which sheds light on important dimensions of equality law

A New European Parity-Democracy Sex Equality Model and why it won't Fly in the United States

This Article argues that over the past years, in Europe, some instruments and policies dealing with gender equality both at the national and supra-national level reflect a move from a narrow antidiscrimination frame to a broader model that tackles the underparticipation and disempowerment of women in public and private life as a deficiency of democracy and a problem of citizenship. By analyzing specific parity measures that have been adopted recently in some European Member States, such as electoral and corporate board gender quotas in publically held companies, the Article posits that a new understanding between parity democracy, sex equality and antidiscrimination law is evolving and explains why a combination of legal, historical, cultural, ideological and political factors make it unlikely that a similar development will take place in the United States

The achievement of female suffrage in Europe: on women’s citizenship

This article lays out the theoretical framing underlying the gendered construction of citizenship in Western political thought during the transition to modernity; describes the relevant actors in the fight for female suffrage and the impact that the separate spheres of ideology had on both the narratives supporting and resisting female suffrage, and on the selective and piecemeal way in which suffrage was eventually won by women in European countries. Furthermore, it identifies the main factors accounting for women’s earlier or later achievement of suffrage in different European nations and, exploring the connection between women’s access to voting rights and to civil and social rights, it retells a story of women’s citizenship which is an inverted image of that developed by T.H. Marshall on the basis of the male paradigm. It finally brings us to the present to discuss the persistent political under-representation of women in Europe, as well as a growing awareness about the need to ensure women’s full citizenship through measures that seek the incorporation of women in male spheres of power and the disestablishment of the sexual contract, something which the historical conquest of suffrage could not achieve by itself

The (dis)establishment of gender: Care and gender roles in the family as a constitutional matter

This article reasons that for women, as constitutional subjects, the emancipatory promise of constitutionalism was—from its inception—fundamentally limited by the entrenchment of the separate spheres tradition. Focusing on evolving constitutional jurisprudence in the US, Germany and Italy, the article describes a gradual and still imperfect process of (dis) establishment of the originally enshrined gender order, as it has unfolded since the 1970s in US and European constitutionalism. It is argued that these processes have allowed the constitutional doctrine of sex equality to challenge the most forthright expressions of the separate spheres ideology, denying the possibility of according men and women a different legal status of rights and duties and keeping women away from the marketplace. In spite of this, to this day, the sex constitutional equality doctrine has been an inadequate tool to fully subvert the pre-established gender order in both its transatlantic iterations. In the US, we find assimilationist workerism with its anti-stereotyping conception of gender equality, providing no support for working women, and in Europe accommodationist workerism, wherein special measures are fostered at the risk of entrenching rather than subverting existing gender roles. The article then describes recent evolutions in constitutionalism pointing to a promising third way, with Nordic inspiration, which, challenging traditionally accepted notions of family privacy and foregrounding fatherhood as opposed to just motherhood, would allow us to retain the central importance attached to care and reproduction, but at the same time assist in the process of overcoming traditional gender assumptions and stereotypes built around them

“ Alles oder Nichts ” ? The outer boundaries of the German citizenship debate

In this article we explore how constitutionally enshrined and historically conditioned conceptions of membership in Germany have continued to frame citizenship debates over the last two decades. These debates have been revived both by domestic developments, such as mass migration, and by external factors, such as European integration. The larger question examined is the extent to which, at least in the European Union, conceptions of “ citizenship ” now evolve in reaction to “ internal ” or “ external ” factors, and how the balance of such factors shapes the outcome of particular changes in policy. In our inquiry, we look fi rst at the evolution of policy on access to full citizenship in Germany and then at that of its attendant rights and obligations. Finally, we draw certain general conclusions from the German example for European integration and for possible scenarios of coexistence of the national and European citizenship models

Anti-Discrimination Exceptionalism: Racist Violence before the ECtHR and the Holocaust Prism

Over the past years, the European Court of Human Rights has significantly developed and strengthened its Article 14 non-discrimination jurisprudence, including in a number of ground-breaking international law cases establishing increased state responsibility with regard to ethnic segregation in education and gender violence. However, in the type of cases that constitute a large part of its non-discrimination case load, namely physical violence against racial minorities, the Court has so far failed to adequately address Article 14 discrimination claims raised by the victims. We posit that this could be caused in part by what we call the ‘Holocaust Prism’. Put briefly, the experience of the Holocaust has shaped the manner in which continental European courts understand racism and race discrimination, at least (or especially) when it is combined with violence. Paradoxically, this entails that in the most heinous cases of race discrimination, the discrimination threshold is raised to the level of criminal conduct. Moreover, to the extent that it is, only the ethnic dimension of such discrimination is foregrounded even in cases that present obvious intersectional (for example, ethnicity plus gender) dimensions. We exemplify this phenomenon by discussing recent case law on forced sterilization of Roma women and argue that the Court should become aware of this issue, recognize intersectional discrimination and align its case law on racist violence with the discrimination doctrine emerging in its gender violence and educational race segregation cases, both for the sake of internal consistency and to better capture the structural nature of racial discrimination in Europe

The gender of representation: On democracy, equality, and parity

The debate regarding the statutory introduction of gender parity in electoral lists has been led, on the one hand, by those who envisage parity as a way to attain substantive equality between the genders. The opposition has been led by those who, on the other hand, reject it as going against the very principle of equality in its formal dimension, as well as against the autonomy of political parties. Based on the experience of France and Italy on this matter, this article discusses both sets of arguments and applies them to the Spanish context. It further defends the need to bypass the theoretical parameters of equality and affi rmative action in order to place the defense of electoral parity within the theoretical parameters of the postliberal democratic state. It aims, therefore, at articulating electoral parity as a conceptual requisite of the democratic state