This chapter locates gender equality in employment in the European Employment Strategy (EES), and explores its implications in four European Union (EU) Member States exemplifying a four-fold welfare regime typology, which consists of the addition of a fourth, Southern welfare model (Castles 1995; Ferrera 1996; Trifiletti 1999), to Esping-Andersen’s (1990) now classical three-fold typology. These Member States are Spain (Southern welfare regime), Denmark (social-democratic welfare regime), France (conservative welfare regime), and the UK (liberal welfare regime), each with considerably different starting points and current settings for gender equality in the labour market. The focus on the welfare regime typology aims to highlight how gender equality arrangements differ across Member States with distinct welfare legacies and what the EES implies in different welfare settings. Although gender equality in employment was predominantly promoted through the components of a ‘hard’legislative framework, such as Treaty provisions and Directives, for most of the history of the EU, it is also a core element of the more recent ‘soft’approach to employment and social policy in the EU, best illustrated by the EES. Being one of the areas where the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is applied in one of its most fully-developed forms, the EES has significant implications for gender equality in employment, which was, until 2005, one of its ten ‘priority areas’. The EES highlights the differences amongst the Member States in terms of gender equality in employment, which are closely connected to their welfare state structures. This is particularly important as the EU ‘hard’legislative approach has, for a long time, emphasized the importance of establishing a common legal framework for gender equality, regardless of the diversity of welfare regimes and gender equality practices prevailing in individual countries. In this context the analysis of the EES offers important insights on what novelty is brought by the ‘soft’EU approach to employment and social policy in an area with an advanced ‘hard’legal background.

The assessment of the impacts of the Community method on national gender equality frameworks is relatively easier due to its more tangible outcomes in terms of the national transposition of EU regulations and the relative ‘oldness’ of the process implying an abundance of research in the area. In contrast, the OMC poses significant challenges regarding the identification of outcomes not just because it is