Abstract
In 1997 the principles of gender mainstreaming and anti-discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation were enshrined in the Treaty of Amsterdam. The introduction to this special issue takes stock of the results twenty years after and finds mixed results. It argues that a supranational EU gender and antidiscrimination regime has developed beyond the original limitations to discrimination between women and men in employment and social security, thanks to the attention to gender equality in other policy domains and the adoption of legal and political instruments dealing with other grounds for discrimination. However, in spite of feminist activism and research, gender mainstreaming has not fulfilled the expectations as a transformative strategy, and member states have limited the development of an antidiscrimination regime to a set of ever softer policy instruments and two binding legal instruments. Importantly, the processes of gender mainstreaming and antidiscrimination remain disconnected institutionally and strategically. Instead of mainstreaming the concept of intersectionality, antidiscrimination policies continue to treat grounds for discrimination separately, gender equality seems to be absorbed by the logic of antidiscrimination as a reactive policy approach, and gender mainstreaming is reduced to inserting woman and man as two fixed categories. Unfortunately, the eastern enlargement, the financial crisis and the legitimacy crisis faced by the EU have created a social and political constellation, which is not propitious for the development of an alternative equality strategy.
