C.1 Understanding the Adoption and Domain Diffusion of Gender Quotas in Europe: A New Typology

Regarding those Nordic countries where quotas have been applied, Anne-Maria Holli describes a sequence of adoption/diffusion which a first generation of legislated electoral quotas (LEQs) is followed by Public Bodies Quotas (PBQs) and then Corporate Board Quotas (CBQs) (Holli Reference Holli, Pini and McDonald2011). However, our cases show that this sequence cannot be generalized across Europe. Indeed, the timing and sequencing of quotas differ greatly across our case studies. While in some countries such as Spain, France, or Slovenia voluntary party quotas – and their persistent inefficiency – led to the adoption of legislated electoral quotas (LEQs); in countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the relative effectiveness of party quotas made claims for LEQs less legitimate and, finally, unsuccessful. In Denmark, party quotas were even abandoned in the mid-1990s precisely at the time when other European countries were picking up gender quotas for electoral politics. Moreover, some of the countries that did not adopt LEQs were among the first to adopt PBQs and CBQs, starting in the early 1990s, although this was not a general rule. Thus, while Norway invested as early as 1981 in compulsory affirmative action to raise the numbers of women in public service decision-making, Denmark and Sweden did not. Other countries like Belgium and Greece started to experiment with public bodies quotas relatively early on, at the beginning of the 1990s, at a time when Italy was passing its first electoral gender quota law, soon to be declared unconstitutional.

These variations across countries in timing and sequencing, as well as in the preferred domains of quota implementation, suggest that the gender quota revolution unfolds differently in different scenarions. We claim that these scenarios, determined by the way quota reform is discussed, contested, adopted, or rejected in the three domains where quotas have so far been mostly applied, reveal the extent to which gender quotas might successfully challenge a country's prevalent gender regime. From the sequence chart described in Figure C.1, we identify four groups of countries, each following a different historical trajectory when it comes to adopting – or rejecting – gender quotas in the three domains. Studies on other countries might expand the number of paths that the quota revolution can take and further enhance and nuance our understanding of the irresistible rise of gender quotas by capturing other dynamic processes that characterize the adoption and diffusion of gender quotas within a country. Ours is an inductive typology, which does not aim to be empirically exhaustive, but rather tries to define the contours of different patterns explaining the scope of gender quotas adoption, the resistance they meet with, and their eventual ability to transform a country's gender regime. The first of the four identified scenarios includes Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It is characterized by a relative paucity of quota schemes despite an early interest in the question of gender equality in decision-making, attested by the early presence of voluntary party quotas. These countries, especially Denmark and Sweden, illustrate, to various degrees, what we call the gender quotas as accessory equality measures scenario – that is, a reluctance to use quotas in the context of a public gender regime where trust is placed in bottom-up processes that spontaneously express already-existing commitments to gender equality. In some cases, like Sweden, these quotas are accessory measures, called “high echelon quotas” to ensure that women's presence does not decrease: they act as lower threshold rather than as ambitious goals (Dahlerup and Freidenvall Reference Dahlerup and Freidenvall2005).

Figure C.1 Sequence of adoption of gender quota mechanisms in thirteen European countries

• VPQ: Voluntary party quotas (period of adoption)

• PBQ: Public bodies quotas (year of first adoption)

• LEQ: Legislated electoral quotas (year of first adoption of law that has not been constitutionally nullified)

• CBQ: Corporate board quotas (year of first adoption)

• Veto: Constitutional decisions nullifying previous LEQs

The second group includes France, Belgium, Slovenia, and Spain, which are countries characterized by mixed gender regimes with relatively high participation of women in the labor market, but low presence in politics up until the end of the 1990s. Here the quota revolution is unfolding, however at different paces and with different outcomes, and is often linked to the broader of making the democratic system more inclusive and/or disestablishing traditional gender roles. In all these countries, a sequence of diffusion of quotas is shown moving to spheres other than politics, and gender quotas are developed as part of a transformative equality remedies strategy.

A third group comprises countries such as Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Poland; countries sharing a mixed or conservative domestic gender regime in which the adoption of gender quota schemes was often particularly protracted, and which continue to display important sites of resistance by male incumbents to the potential for gender regime change brought by quotas. In this group, quotas can be better described as symbolic equality remedies, with the possible exception of Italy, which may be fast progressing towards the transformative model in the last few years. Finally, a last group includes Germany and Austria, countries also sharing features of conservative domestic gender regimes but which, contrary to the previous group, adopted PBQs early on, thus confirming their early commitment to substantive gender equality in the employment domain and, at the same time, conditioning the chances of successful domain diffusion, with some domains, such as those of representative or elected positions, turning out to be more impenetrable than others, such as corporate governance. In these countries the early development of gender quota policies has so far not brought about the expected gains for women, and gender quotas remain corrective equality remedies.

C.2 The Juridification of the Struggle Around Gender Quotas: Transforming the Meaning of Constitutional Gender Equality?

It was not until the turn of the twentieth century, with women's access to suffrage, that political equality between men and women gradually became the constitutional norm. In some cases, the belated recognition of women's political rights triggered constitutional amendments “to write women in.”Footnote ⁵ Alternatively, women were simply read into the abstract, generic “male” used by constitutions when crafting rights to political participation, sometimes with the assistance of interpreting courts. Be that as it may, since the end of WWII, and clearly by the time the gender quotas movement started to cross the continent, women's equal rights status with men had become a “defining feature” of Europe's democratic constitutionalism. Typically, in European constitutional democracies, the protection of this principle of gender equality was entrusted to the courts though judicial review. It is thus not surprising that, unlike the struggle for suffrage, where law and courts played only a very modest role, the struggle for gender quotas in Europe has been highly juridified, with constitutional rights and principles as well as constitutional courts and experts playing a leading role in the fight for and against gender quotas. From the case studies included in this volume, the only departure from this rule has been that of the Nordic countries’ majoritarian democracies which, with the exception of Norway, have remained reluctant to resort to judicial review, constitutional law and courts being granted overall less centrality in public life. In these countries only the direct influence of European law has somewhat increased the role of the judiciary in settling affirmative action-related controversies.

Interestingly, this volume shows that the juridification of the battle around gender quotas – that is, its removal from the political arena and its partial or central placement within the constitutional one – has, in virtually every case, translated into an increase in the hurdles for women's public empowerment. As a starting point we must recall that, in Europe, it was the formal sex equality model that became the defining constitutional gender equality paradigm in postwar constitutionalism. This paradigm rests on two pillars: first, the proclamation of equal rights between men and women, and second, the recognition of the principle of nondiscrimination on several grounds, including sex. To be accurate, this articulation of gender equality coexisted in some constitutional orders with general provisions expressing a vision of substantive equality, by compelling the state to take proactive action to remove societal discrimination and ensure equal opportunities in favor of marginalized groups, clauses which could potentially be read as including women (e.g. Spain's article 9.2 and Italy's article 3.2). However, the enshrining of positive action, parity, quotas, or even substantive equality explicitly targeting women's or sex-based inequalities were nowhere to be found in early post-WWII constitutionalism.

With formal gender equality being the norm, then, the agenda of gender quotas encountered constitutional hurdles of several kinds. Most clearly, for those countries committed primarily to a formal understanding of equality, granting citizens equal political rights while proscribing any type of distinctions on the grounds of sex, the adoption of gender quotas immediately posed a constitutional problem. Both the argument that quotas for women can unduly restrict male candidates’ active and passive suffrage rights, and that it can stigmatize women themselves by suggesting that they in fact need special treatment beyond the recognition of equal rights, can be pressed in terms of formal equality. In Italy, for instance, it was claimed that quotas treated women like pandas (i.e. like an endangered species), and in Portugal, President Cavaco Silva vetoed one decree (which later in fact became the quota law that was adopted) for being too harsh in its enforcement mechanisms, arguing that the law as crafted infringed upon women's dignity. In more recent times, with quotas being articulated as 50/50 parity or gender-balanced thresholds that apply equally to both genders, the formal equality challenges have sometimes been rejected (for instance by the Italian and Spanish Constitutional Courts) on the basis that these measures in fact treat men and women equally and are articulated in gender neutral terms.

An overarching commitment to formal notions of gender equality (in connection to rights of political participation) reinforced by the country's espousal of a Republican universalist conception of citizenship, explains the strength of the constitutional resistance in France, not only against the adoption of political quotas but also against any further extension of quotas to other domains, including that of corporate governance. Indeed, France is unique in that almost every attempt to expand parity beyond elective functions during the 2000s was met with resistance by both the Constitutional Council and the Conseil d'Etat (the highest administrative Court), even after the first constitutional reform enabling the adoption of political quotas had taken place, precisely because the reform was interpreted as a narrow exception to the dominant norm of formal equality. Thus, the introduction of parity in the lists of candidates for the High Council of Magistrates (Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature) – the main governing body of the judiciary – was declared unconstitutional by the Conseil Constitutionnel.Footnote ⁶ Likewise, corporate board quota legislation was struck down before a second constitutional reform was passed in 2008 to enable this specific domain expansion. Contrary to recalcitrant France, in all other countries, once reformed, the Constitution was no longer held to be a valid tool to prevent quota domain expansion.

This book shows that even in those European countries which do not only embrace formal equality in their Constitution but are also committed to substantive equality – with constitutional provisions asking public powers to remove societal obstacles to the meaningful enjoyment of rights – it has not automatically followed that such generic provisions (expressing concern around the inhibiting potential of social inequalities) cover political quotas for women. Rather, quotas have been seen as affecting not only women's (or men's) political or equality rights, but also the country's overall political system of representation. Only in some cases, such as Spain, has a general constitutional clause expressing commitment to substantive equality (article 9.2) been interpreted as providing sufficient constitutional coverage to gender quotas when challenged in front of the Constitutional Court. Yet in other countries, such as Italy, this has not been possible; instead, the Court has attached to formal equality an absolute value in the political domain by underscoring its link to representativeness. In Italy, despite a generic substantive equality clause, the Constitution still had to be amended before electoral gender quotas could be passed. Moreover, depending on the specific way in which quotas are crafted, they can be interpreted as more or less justified departures from formal equality for the purpose of achieving remedial goals. In this regard, sometimes a line is drawn separating measures that validly ensure equal opportunities from those that arguably step beyond the legitimate realm of remedial action to directly seek equal results, something which can be seen as constitutionally problematic (a line drawn by the Constitutional Court in Italy, for instance).

However, the constitutional hurdles for gender quotas lie not only in the possibility of infringing on provisions of equality before the law and active and passive voting rights of male candidates. In almost every country in this volume, opponents and plaintiffs challenging quota legislation have also alleged that gender quotas infringe on the prima facie constitutional claim to freedom of political parties and their immunity from state interference. Not surprisingly, this argument has found great resonance in Eastern European countries from the former socialist bloc, which are particularly sensitive to the question, given their previous authoritarian traditions of repressing political pluralism, whether or not the passage of electoral gender quotas required a prior constitutional amendment (as it did in Slovenia, but not in Poland).

In addressing constitutional challenges against quotas, some national courts have explicitly recalled their international obligations (calling on both hard and soft law) pertaining to the gender-balanced representation of women to favorably interpret their constitutions. This was the case, for instance, in Italy and in Greece. In the latter, the Council of State invoked EC Equality Directive (76/207), but also the CEDAW Convention and EC recommendation 96/694/EC about the balanced participation of men and women in decision-making bodies, to advance the view that positive measures in favor of women were not contrary to equality. Also, as we saw in several countries, including the Nordic ones, when the matter was determined to fall within the competence of EU law – paradigmatically, but not only, when it concerned quotas in the public employment sector – national courts deferred to the judgment of the ECJ, and European, not national, law became the relevant legal parameter for deciding what affirmative action measures were legally permitted when challenged by formal equality claims of male plaintiffs, as illustrated in the chapters on Germany, Austria, and Sweden.

Given the manifold constitutional obstacles that can and have been raised to resist the tide of gender quotas, this book illustrates the rich typology of mechanisms that have been put into place in order to address these hurdles. In a nutshell, we find that the two main mechanisms have been constitutional reform and constitutional interpretation by courts, with the former being the dominant tool expressed in two possible varieties, a pure and a mixed form. Given the level of generality of constitutional provisions (including those concerning equality) and the existence of several constitutional rights and principles relevant to the conversation, the interpretive role of courts has proven essential in some jurisdictions, making constitutional reform unnecessary in some instances (e.g. Spain).

As for constitutional amendment processes, we distinguish three types: “preemptive,” “enabling,” and “reinforcing” amendments. In some countries (such as Portugal or Slovenia), a constitutional amendment was passed before the adoption of quota legislation (hence, preemptively) in the understanding that, without it, such legislation would not have overcome possible constitutional hurdles. In other countries, the constitutional amendment process was undertaken after intervening constitutional courts had detected otherwise insurmountable constitutional obstacles, thus enabling quota legislation to be enacted (as was the case in France and Italy). Finally, in some cases, constitutional amendment processes were held only to reinforce and strengthen the constitutionality of legislation that had already been declared by the courts through constitutional interpretation (as in Belgium or in Greece – thanks, in the latter case, to a change of doctrine resulting from strategic litigation in front of the Council of State with judicial review powers). In fact, these countries owe the constitutional acceptance of gender quotas to a process that ultimately combined evolutionary constitutional interpretation through the courts with formal constitutional amendments. The exception thus remains the case of Spain, where constitutional interpretation by the Constitutional Court alone was sufficient to overcome formal challenges to the constitutionality of legislation. In addition to this, the book contains examples of constitutional amendments enshrining substantive gender equality that were not a direct response to a specific challenge of (proposed or approved) legislated gender quotas, but a general move towards a new gender equality paradigm (such as in Sweden, Germany, and Austria).

In these amendment processes to enshrine substantive gender equality and/or to enable the passage of legislative quotas, we can distinguish between bottom-up processes (as in Germany, Austria, and Greece) and top-down processes (as in Portugal and Italy, where women's groups either did not engage in the quota struggle actively or did so with very little effect), as well as between a variety of different actors taking the lead. These include mostly political parties (as in Portugal and Italy) and women's groups, sometimes with the assistance of cross-party alliances (as in Germany, where a cross-party alliance of women in parliament was key to the reform of article 3.2GG; Greece, where a wider constitutional reform process in the second half of the 1990s presented an opportunity for feminists to push for positive measures leading to the 2001 constitutional amendment; or Austria, where a popular movement called the women's referendum was crucial for the constitutional amendment). In exceptional cases, the courts themselves proposed the need for constitutional reform, as in France, where the Constitutional Council took the lead in suggesting its need motu proprio. This volume clearly shows that, in Europe, constitutional reform processes as well have had a contagion effect, with the French reform affecting those in Belgium and Italy, and the reforms in Austria, Germany, and Portugal affecting that in Greece, where the reform campaign explicitly referred to a constitutional tradition in the making, shared by many EU member states in a growing number of national constitutions guaranteeing substantive equality and incorporating positive action provisions. Not surprisingly, the narrative in support of constitutional amendments in most of these countries included arguments based on international and European laws and policies in support of women's empowerment.

As for the substantive outcome of constitutional reforms, some countries inserted provisions compelling the state to actively take measures to ensure equality between men and women and to eliminate inequalities specifically to the detriment of women, without any specific mention to a concrete domain (e.g. Greece's article 116.2, Germany's article 3.2, or paragraph h of article 9° of the Portuguese Constitution). Other reforms, especially when responding to a direct need to give constitutional coverage to gender quotas, have been more explicit, introducing a clause either enabling or compelling the state or the legislature to take measures to promote equality or equal opportunities for women to stand for elections and to access electoral office (as in Slovenia and Portugal), or to advance equal access by women and men to elective mandates and public office (France and Italy) or to positions of professional and social responsibility (France). Belgium is the exception: it has not only adopted an enabling clause, but also inserted a form of gender quota directly into its Constitution (with article 11 bis, known as the parity provision, requiring the executive to contain members of both sexes, and article 67, mandating, since 2011, no more than two thirds of senate members of the same sex). However, none of the other constitutional reforms set the basis for a subjective entitlement, allowing women to claim an enforceable right to equal representation – and in fact the possibility has been explicitly rejected by the French Constitutional Council in its recent decision on the matter, upholding statutory gender quotas in certain university governance committees.Footnote ⁷

In general, the overall assessment of the constitutional reforms discussed in this book shows that in most of the European countries in which gender equality is centrally entrenched in the country's constitutional democracy, a process of constitutional transformation has indeed taken place, supporting a renewed conception of women's citizenship. Indeed, in an increasing number of European countries, renewed constitutional standards demand state action to ensure the presence of women in representative institutions and decision-making bodies, not just passive recognition of their abstract entitlement to an equal right to participation. These cases mark a constitutional shift, through amendment and interpretation, towards substantive gender equality and renewed conceptions of democratic legitimacy, making the active participation of women an essential precondition. In some cases the specific placement of the reform is most telling of its symbolic dimension. This is the case in France, where the commitment to gender parity now figures in article 1 of the Constitution, among the fundamental values defining the French Republic.

C.3 Patterns of Mobilization: Reconfigurations and Alliances for Gender Equality in the Twenty-First Century

Besides documenting the increasing role of supranational and national courts in many European countries debating gender quotas, the set of cases collected in this volume offers confirmation of the key actors in quota adoption, identified by previous studies, but also new insights. When analyzed from a comparative perspective, these countries reveal new patterns of mobilization for women's rights and women's political participation, in which women's policy agencies play a crucial role.

Indeed, the authors of this volume confirm that women's sections in left-wing political parties (as well as, where women's sections were weak, simply individual women within left-wing parties) have been instrumental in starting the quota revolution by pushing for internal quotas in their parties and, more importantly in terms of impact, for quotas on candidate lists. The historically lukewarm embrace of female suffrage by left-wing political forces, fearing women's conservative or regressive politics, seems to have finally faded – whether or not such forces have then prioritized women's empowerment in national settings (Rubio-Marín Reference Rubio Marín2014, 9–11). Indeed, socialist, social-democratic, and green parties in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, and Sweden were among the first to adopt voluntary gender quotas, between the end of the 1970s and the mid-1980s. While quota adoption by political parties signalled the penetration of the feminist second wave into the realm of formal politics, implementation varied greatly from one country to the next, with France and Belgium being examples of failed voluntary party quotas and Norway and Sweden illustrating the potential of these self-imposed tools for bringing more and more women into politics.

Mobilizations inside political parties were often relayed or supported by mobilizations outside political parties, that is, within the autonomous women's movement. Indeed, the coalition between women inside and outside of political parties has proven to be as beneficial as it was in the fight for female suffrage (Rubio-Marín Reference Rubio Marín2014, 12–15). These coalitions formed in different ways across European countries, with autonomous women's organizations pressuring parties through competition, shaming tactics, and, eventually, bypassing them entirely when resistance proved too hard to overcome internally. In France, when feminists within parties were unable to obtain better political representation, they changed tactics and, instead of pursuing internal lobbying, they allied with autonomous women's organizations to get around their parties’ fierce opposition to their demands. Once they had succeeded in making the issue politically relevant, they encouraged party competition. In Sweden, as shown by Lenita Freidenvall's chapter, women's organizations went even further and reacted to the decrease in female representation following the 1991 legislative elections by forming a network called Stödstrumporna (the Support Stockings) and threatening to create a women's party, a threat which finally proved efficient in convincing traditional political parties to place more women on their lists. In Austria, feminists threatened to create a women's party and then created an autonomous association, Unabhängiges Frauenforum (UFF, Autonomous Women's Platform) in 1996 to launch a people's initiative on women's issues, the so-called “women's referendum” that proved crucial in revising the Constitution and enshrining a more substantive conception of equality. In Greece, it was mostly women lawyers who mobilized outside political parties to create momentum in the public sphere to ask for a constitutional revision of the definition of gender equality, a revision that proved instrumental in passing gender quota laws. Hence, in countries where political parties proved responsive to the claims of women inside their ranks, voluntary party quotas proved efficient and women's sections in parties and autonomous women's organizations allied at strategic junctures to ensure compliance. In countries where political parties, including on the Left, proved unwilling to change, the gender quota revolution was delayed and women's autonomous organizations played a much more important role, displacing the debate from inside parties to the public realm, asking for legislated quotas or threatening to take away women's votes by creating women's parties. In those countries where both the commitment of political parties and women's movements were missing, the revolution was, as we have seen, very limited in scope and reach.

While the struggle for women's political representation offered women inside and outside parties an opportunity to form coalitions, public bodies quotas and corporate board quotas offered a different set of opportunities to a different set of actors. Indeed, unlike electoral quotas, for the most part neither type of quota stirred up important public debates or feminist mobilization (even though in some cases women's social movements did take part in the debate, such as in Germany and Italy). To a large extent this difference can be explained by the fact that these struggles were seen as “corporatist” struggles for already privileged women. Instead, these gender quotas were generally the work of bureaucratic insiders and critical feminist actors within executive or the legislative powers. In line with scholarly work showing women's policy agency's increasing – although unstable and variable – power in European countries since the 1990s (McBride and Mazur Reference McBride and Mazur2010), our set of cases shows the crucial role played by femocrats and gender equality offices in the conquest of gender quotas. In Norway, Austria, and Germany, none of which had adopted LEQs, emerging state feminist institutions were crucial in pushing, and passing, PBQs as early as the 1990s. In France and Belgium these institutions were instrumental in the diffusion of quotas – from electoral quotas to public bodies and corporate boards – and allowed crucial actors to step outside party lines.

The comparative perspective on the adoption of corporate board quotas shows that they rarely spark mobilization from the traditional actors in the women's movement. Nor is the cause often framed as a matter of equality or equal rights. Rather, CBQs have often been encouraged by businesswomen – increasingly united around this cause in view of the slowness of spontaneous, market- and merit-based progress, which many initially defended – often in the name of women's specific abilities in governance (i.e. risk averse attitudes) or in the name of diversity (the business case for diversity). These arguments are in a spirit typical of the growing business-feminism that has taken shape globally and that foregrounds the notion of general interest over that of justice or rights, something that, once again, may account for its relative success in a short time (Engelstad and Teigen Reference Engelstad and Teigen2012). Also, CBQs have often been the work of critical individual actors, both left- and right-wing ministers for women's rights or MPs invested in bureaucratic organs in charge of gender equality. In France, Marie-Jo Zimmermman, head of the Observatory for Parity, was instrumental in the passing of the corporate board quota law. In Norway, the Gender Equality Ombud, Anne Lise Ryel, launched the idea, which was later picked up and included in the revision of the Norwegian gender equality act by Minister Haugland. In Sweden, as early as 1993, Deputy Prime Minister and Gender Equality Minister Bengt Westerberg (from the Liberal Party) appointed the first commission of inquiry to study the possibility of achieving a more equal distribution of male and female managers in business. In 2002, with no clear change in the numbers of women on boards in sight, Minister Margareta Winberg from the Social Democratic government threatened companies with the adoption of legislated corporate board quotas if they did not comply voluntarily within five years, a threat that proved effective.

The stories of individual critical actors – often, but not always, women – should not obscure the fact that they tend to act as representatives of WPAs, thereby overshadowing the potential of the latter as sites of institutional non-partisan commitment to women's equality. Women's policy agencies indeed provide key actors with important resources – expert reports, statistics, and networks – that are crucial for their claims to be successful. In France, Marie-Jo Zimmerman actively lobbied within her own conservative party to pass a constitutional reform enabling CBQs after the Conseil Constitutionnel had struck down pertinent legislation, while she was head of both the Observatory for parity, a governmental agency in charge of monitoring the implementation of LEQs, and the parliamentary delegation for women's rights. She was therefore a key insider with an important network and resources she could mobilize to lobby her cause and even resist opposing internal party pressure.

In short, corporate board and public bodies quotas offer significantly different paths to quota adoption than legislated electoral quotas, and they show the importance of women's policy agencies and individual femocrat insiders. Yet interconnections abound, and these bureaucratic insiders and key political figures were able to capitalize on previous legal gains – made during the process of adoption of LEQs or PBQs – to press for quota diffusion in other domains. In particular, we find that constitutional reforms explicitly enshrining substantive gender equality (as in Austria, Belgium, and Germany), or preexisting comprehensive equality statutes (like the Norwegian gender equality act), have all facilitated the adoption of gender quotas in public bodies. Once enshrined in law, these foundational legal equality frames have proven crucial for WPAs to promote the diffusion of gender quotas to other domains, illustrating the ways in which further gains can be achieved for women's citizenship in an era of institutionalization of gender equality and feminism. Where strong WPAs do not exist, for example in Greece, the adoption of constitutional amendments that enabled the passing of LEQs has not led to the fast diffusion of gender quotas mechanisms to other domains such as CBQs, as a lack of institutional structures fails to provide key insiders with the needed tools and platform. In short, while the rationales used by actors to push for quotas remain strikingly similar across countries and across domains, combining the usual equality and difference frames as well as principled and pragmatic arguments, the actors who use them differ from one domain to the next.

The various paths to quota adoption reveal the complex picture of women's mobilizations in the twenty-first century. Indeed, we see women's organizations using multilevel governance and transnational networks to pursue their goals, relying on ties to international and European institutions and their legal instruments and policies, and drawing on common framings and narratives as well as on the shared experience and accumulated knowledge of neighboring countries. We see women's policy agencies taking an important role in quota diffusion and sometimes forging alliances with women's organizations that increase the opportunities for passing ambitious gender quota schemes, or even taking the lead where movement mobilization is largely absent, often under the leadership of key individual actors, even if it means settling for less ambitious reforms. While CBQs attest to the emergence and increasing relevance of a form of market-friendly, moderate, or soft feminism that puts the accent on efficiency rather than gender justiceFootnote ⁸ (as one would reasonably expect in the private sector and with regards to elite professions), with some rare exceptions, traditional women's rights organizations remain much less interested in the question of women's access to economic power than in women's access to political power. This bias, inherited from the second wave, explains the low mobilization for corporate board quotas, which is largely perceived as an elitist bourgeois agenda of secondary interest for women's struggles. As a consequence, this claim is mainly promoted through EU governance tools (such as the European Strategy for Gender Equality (2016–19)) and WPAs.

C.4 Quotas and Transformative Politics: Towards Parity Governance?

The irresistible diffusion of gender quotas from one domain to the next when political circumstances are favorable – that is, from electoral politics to the public administration, the judiciary, universities, or corporate boards – is imposing women's presence in the remaining bastions of patriarchal power. Moreover, the diffusion across countries and domains of gender quotas invites the question of whether a consensus is gradually emerging across Europe around substantive gender equality as the new shared sex equality paradigm or, to go even further, around “parity governance” requiring the equal presence and participation of both genders in decision-making (Rubio-Marín Reference Rubio-Marín2012). Whereas in citizenship terms, the former could possibly encompass the adoption of temporary remedial measures to ensure equal opportunities or de facto equality within a liberal egalitarian tradition of citizenship, especially suited to social democratic regimes dominant in Europe, the latter would instead propose an important redefinition of democratic citizenship, making the equal presence of women a new overall requirement for legitimacy. Susan Franceschet and Jennifer Piscopo (Reference Franceschet and Piscopo2013) have argued that in Latin America, the spread of quotas across domains other than the legislative, the increase in the expected percentages for gender balance (to a ratio of 60/40 and/or 50/50), the permanence of the intended measures, and the shift in the framing narrative (from temporary special measures/affirmative action/minimal thresholds to gender-balanced representation and parity) all suggest that gender quotas have become a tool in the redefinition of democracy with gender parity now seen as a structural precondition for democratic legitimacy. The question is whether something similar can be said of the process in Europe – a process that uniquely includes the diffusion of quotas into corporate governance (not at all widespread in Latin America) and hence, into the private domain of power and governance.

Our set of countries shows a clear and positive shift towards substantive gender equality, with European law rendering the legitimacy of affirmative action to remedy societal discrimination ever more explicit and many European countries joining the trend of constitutional reforms to allow the state to take proactive measures to ensure women's de facto equality. This in itself is a significant and important finding. As to the possible convergence towards a parity-governance model the answer is more nuanced. Indeed, the rationale for equal sharing of political power, and the terms parity, parity democracy, and gender-balanced representation – all of which have been advanced by the European institutional machinery – can be found in increasingly more European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, and also, recently, Germany. However, this concept does not always mean the same thing or endorse the same operational tools in every setting. Thus, when it comes to electoral politics, although quotas are generally conceptualized as permanent, not temporary measures, the threshold, far from targeting the 50/50 or 40/60 ratios that gender parity or gender-balanced representation are associated with, in some cases remains at one third (i.e. the traditional minimum threshold) despite the use of a parity or gender-balanced rhetoric. This has been the case in Portugal, Italy, Poland, and Greece, for example. Time will tell whether the difference is in principle or only in strategy, reflective of what might be perceived as different opportunity structures in different scenarios, even if the ultimate objective is a shared one. It also remains to be seen if the pressure from women's movements or WPAs will increase these low thresholds to 50 percent. On the other hand, the domain expansion is indeed a confirmed trend, though it has proceeded at very different speeds, leading to a wide variety of participation thresholds. For spheres other than politics, the majority of countries that implement quotas consider that gender balance now means at least 40-percent women, with exceptions in Belgium, which still implements one-third quotas, and Germany and Austria, which implement 30- or 35-percent quotas for corporate boards.

All in all, these variations suggest that convergence may not be automatic, and that the parity democracy discourse has not, by itself, had the same impact in different arenas of power, neither in terms of domain spread for quota policies nor in terms of target thresholds. Moreover, beyond numbers, the parity democracy discourse and gender quotas in general have not reconfigured the relationship between gender equality, democracy and the public/private dichotomy in the same way across countries. For a long time the political and academic debate on gender quotas has focused on the “critical mass” argument, implying that as more women enter decision-making positions thanks to quotas, their participation would change the rules of the game.Footnote ⁹ Our comparative perspective shifts the focus away from sheer numbers to the transformation that gender quotas may or may not bring to gendered citizenship. As our typology has meant to suggest, in some countries the transformative potential of gender quotas is more fully engaged than in others, where the adoption of gender quotas does not succeed in challenging the dominant gender regime, whether because of the persistent resistance of political elites, the lack of women's mobilization, the weakness of WPAs, or a combination of all of these factors. These mixed results indicate that, depending on the context, gender quotas can be corrective measures – defined by Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser, Benhabib and Fraser2003) as remedies which do not challenge the state of power relations among groups or preexisting structures of oppression – or transformative measures, which aim to tackle the root of economic and political inequalities by changing economic, social, and political structures, affecting not only the situation of an exploited class or a dominated group but of everyone in society; i.e. the prevalent gender order.

At face value, gender quotas might appear to be paradigmatic examples of corrective mechanisms: like other affirmative action policies, gender quotas acknowledge existing gender inequalities and how they are embedded in pervasive structures of power but do not address the root cause of the problem behind women's disempowerment, such as job market segregation, gendered citizenship, the gendered division of labor, and the public/private divide. Like many affirmative action policies, gender quotas seem to aim at correcting inequalities at the margins, or rather at the high end of a pyramid of inequalities embedded in social mechanisms that extend way beyond the realm of political representation, corporate boards, or state organs. However, the difference between corrective and transformative measures might not be as clear as it seems. Indeed, Fraser herself suggests the possibility of “non-reformists reforms,” that use corrective mechanisms but by doing so alter or transform the grounds upon which future policies will be elaborated (and future social struggles will be fought). These non-reformist reforms, despite their apparently corrective nature, initiate a trajectory of social change.

Following Fraser's insights, we may argue that gender quotas, which appear at first sight to be a purely corrective and reformist tool, may in fact contribute to a more radical social transformation than their current political agenda reveals. Nonetheless, whether a corrective mechanism can become a transformative one heavily depends on context. Quotas are not per se either a corrective mechanism or a transformative tool. Underlying the typology we have described, we sustain the claim that gender quotas have a greater transformative potential when backed by a broad social and political consensus around the need to redefine the gender and/or citizenship model, and when they require parity or gender-balanced representation in all spheres of male domination both in the public and private domain. As the chapters in this volume show, the realization of this consensus of course depends heavily on the preexisting gender regime in each country. It is also important to note, as countries may shift over time from one category to the next, that the dynamic of transformation that characterizes gender quota reforms can rapidly change. Countries in which gender quotas are seen as only corrective measures may, depending on the evolution of the political context, use this tool in a more transformative manner in the future. Moreover, two additional elements, detailed below, can make gender quotas more transformative.

The first element is the way in which gender quotas may or may not validate a substantive conception of equality as equality of outcome in the legal order, going beyond mere constitutional proclamation and paving the way for more positive measures for women. In this sense, the justifications used for gender quotas matter. The fact is that, as remarked by Rolandsen Agustín, Siim, and Borchorst in their chapter, during the 1990s a new discourse and rhetoric of the profitability of gender equality within a range of institutions, from business to higher education, has become prominent, reinforcing the argument that gender quotas are beneficial not only for women's rights but also for industry, for society, and for men. The business case for diversity in company boards is another clear example of this type of justification. While the argument that gender quotas on company boards will increase economic competitiveness might be appealing to the business community and provide instrumental reasons to gain wide support while, at the same time, being less divisive than an argument coined in terms of gender equality and social justice, these rationales can in fact limit the transformative potential of quotas. Indeed, this argument subsumes normative arguments about gender equality beneath pragmatic economic arguments, with the risk that quotas will be delegitimized if they don't deliver economic results (which may likely be the case). The discourse based on expected economic gains makes gender discrimination invisible and creates a normative hierarchy between economic profitability and equality (and therefore a hierarchy between the economic sphere and the political sphere) that does not contribute to subverting gender hierarchies. In other words, there may be instrumental and strategic – and not only principled – considerations among the panoply of arguments put forward to gather consensus around disputed reforms, but some of the arguments deployed may have mid-term political and practical consequences for the reach and the meaning of those very reforms.

The second element to consider is whether gender quotas are indeed coupled with the objective of disestablishing the public/private divide, and the ways in which it has unduly restricted women's equality and men and women's capabilities since its entrenchment in the structure of the modern state. By affirming that the power to decide should be fairly distributed between men and women, the discourses on parity democracy and gender-balanced participation (understood as a 50/50 or a 40/60 distribution respectively) contribute to eroding the traditional association of men with the public sphere and of women with the private sphere. Gender quotas aiming at parity can therefore be seen as providing new social norms for governance and democracy (Rodríguez Ruiz and Rubio-Marín Reference 458Rodríguez Ruiz and Rubio-Marín2008). This link between gender quotas and the disestablishment of the public/private divide is apparent for example in the 2011 Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly Resolution 1825, which states that, in order to increase women's participation in decision-making bodies, its member states should not only implement gender quota mechanisms on corporate boards, but also “introduce positive measures to ensure reconciliation of private and working life, in particular as regards parental leave, balanced participation of women and men in family life …” In this emerging, and still marginal, discourse, gender quotas are only one tool among many – but an important one – to challenge the gendered dimension of the public/private dichotomy (Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum2009). In fact, quotas indeed are sometimes adopted within legislative frameworks seeking this broader objective – a promising sign, for in the end, “public parity” cannot be achieved without “private parity.”

Future prospects for true transformation of citizenship are uncertain. There are some hopeful signs, such as the fact that the gender quota revolution is still very much in the making with the clear and mostly irreversible trend (only contradicted in our set of countries by Denmark) of more and more countries adopting gender quotas (if and when they realize that gender equal representation will not happen spontaneously) in a growing number of domains, with ever-higher thresholds and with an expectation of permanence. The institutionalization of WPAs also suggests that the gender quota revolution might continue to unfold even in the absence of a strong women's movement. Moreover, in the European context, substantive gender equality has increasingly become the new gender equality paradigm, often with explicit constitutional recognition, and male governance, including in the corporate world, has reason to be challenged in view of the dramatic economic downturn.

On the other hand, there are less promising signs. For one, the recent upsurge of extreme right-wing, xenophobic, populist, and sometimes clearly anti-European political forces embracing an explicit anti-gender and anti-quotas agenda is a new phenomenon whose ultimate reach is difficult to predict. Moreover, while the overall deterioration of the living conditions of many Europeans since the financial and economic crisis – only aggravated by austerity policies – can indeed help highlight the importance of gendering economic decision-making and support the spread of corporate board quotas to counter the global trends of deregulation which are partly responsible for the crisis, these conditions can also succeed in lowering the relative political salience of the struggle for women's empowerment. Similarly, the perceived threat of immigrant and refugee flows, and the “more fundamental” challenges to women's equality that those flows are said to bring, may divert the attention away from the forms of domination still affecting the preexisting population of women. More importantly, the prevailing neoliberal/minimal state ethos makes it unlikely that European states will follow (or improve on) the Nordic example by increasing their level of involvement to alleviate care demands traditionally placed on families and hence, on women, and to interfere with spontaneous family arrangements regarding the distribution of care – which have always overburdened women and continue to do so today. In other words, in most European countries we are still far from approaching gender parity in the private domain of care, and the conditions to promote this agenda seem doubtful.

Last but not least, if the comprehensive transformation of citizenship into forms that guarantee greater inclusiveness and equality is the ultimate goal, it must be noted that the struggle for the empowerment of the oppressed and underrepresented, as expressed through the struggle for quotas, has on the whole remained restricted to gender in the countries under scrutiny in this volume. That is, in almost none of our cases did the debate on electoral gender quotas evolve into serious debates for the political inclusion of other minorities, especially ethnic or visible minorities. While in Belgium the preexisting representation of linguistic communities did help the claim for gender quotas, the reverse has not happened in any of the countries we have examined. Only in corporate governance has the discourse of gender quotas been articulated around corporate imperatives for diversity, but with no empirical evidence as yet of concrete measures developing this broader agenda. An expanding field of research examines the relationship between gender quotas and quotas for other minorities and ethnic groups (see Bird Reference Bird2001; Htun Reference Htun2004; Krook and O'Brien Reference Krook and O'Brien2010; Hughes Reference Hughes2011; Lépinard Reference Lépinard2013), but the empirical primacy given to gender over other grounds of discrimination remains so far unchallenged, leaving open the question of whether a profound transformation of citizenship can rest on the disestablishment of the gender binary alone.