Status of Women committee  I could jump in if there is time. You were talking about budgetary decisions and infrastructure. If you were to include gendered knowledge of economic policy, you would have a different notion of investment, including investment in the care economy and an awareness of the downward pressures from the state cutting back on welfare policies and social services.

Status of Women committee  I'll jump in, because you said that the people on the video conference should. I concur with the idea about different levels of implementation. I think external evaluation and impact assessment are very important, because then you can get experts who would be able to draw back and think perhaps more ambitiously about what the possibilities are within a policy.

Status of Women committee  You could see specific mechanisms through which gender mainstreaming was circumvented. But in terms of the characteristics of the subdepartments within DG Research, it was noticeable that the successful department was already used to trying to corral and administer policy aims that might compete.

Status of Women committee  I was going to say that I think it's also important to ensure—and this point was made by one of the experts you have in the room with you now—that doing gender mainstreaming well isn't a career killer. Within particular parts of the European Commission, it is. People will do gender mainstreaming for a couple of years, and then say, “I've cost myself enough credibility here.

Status of Women committee  I agree with what the other speakers are saying. I did mention in my contribution that setting up gender leads, and then putting them in strategic places through a department, is of one of the ways you can have a phased-in stage before it is completely mandatory. You regularize contact between experts and people doing normal implementation.

Status of Women committee  I do think that the other panellists are saying things that already answer that question. If you want me to name specific examples, certainly within the EU, oversight is continually a problem, because the policy has tended to move on goodwill. That is why the other panellists are perhaps able to cite examples better than I can.

Status of Women committee  I think I would draw a distinction between what happens in business and what happens in government. For me, gender mainstreaming is about changing state policy and the way the state shapes gender inequality, whereas businesses are more likely to do equal opportunities and to be driven by the kind of profit case that Dr.

Status of Women committee  The two leaders would be the directors general for employment, probably development as well, and science and research—so there are three, actually. Since the financial crisis, however, the EU has been dismantling its gender mainstreaming and its equal opportunities policy by stealth.

Status of Women committee  If you ask about lessons, perhaps I would be slightly provocative and say that one of the lessons that could come out of analysis of business is the way that.... When gender mainstreaming is inserted into a liberal agenda—rather than, say, a social democratic one—it can become quite limited and subordinated to aims that are perhaps rather far away from the original aims pursued in something like the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on women, which is what came out of the UN and started gender mainstreaming rolling internationally.

Status of Women committee  I am really sorry, but my expertise is on the European Union and the European Commission, so I don't have expertise on the Netherlands or the member states specifically. I look at EU-level policy that comes out of Brussels and the European Commission.

Status of Women committee  I would turn the question around slightly. You're asking where the good lessons are, and I hear the other panellists talking in ambitious terms, which I very much welcome, about GBA+ and these kinds of things, but it is useful to think about why the policy hasn't happened. Surely it's because of widespread disinterest in the fairness goals that are being discussed.

Status of Women committee  Yes, if I've understood your own questions rightly, in my contribution, I'm saying that gender-based analysis needs to contribute to the actual vision of a policy. Certainly, if you look at a variety of gender mainstreaming, like gender budgeting, where, frequently, when a budget is mainstreamed, it just comes in at the last minute.

Status of Women committee  Yes, it would lead to different actions being taken. For example, in research policy we saw new research being conducted that wouldn't otherwise have been done if gender mainstreaming hadn't been quite effectively implemented.

Status of Women committee  If I can jump in here, I think within the European Union there was a high point in gender mainstreaming. It's now falling off the agenda. Certainly the Scandinavian countries do provide examples of very well-conceptualized policies, but there are always implementation problems. You always have resistance to this policy.

Status of Women committee  My opinion would be that a legislated approach would be most likely to actually deliver compliance. Having said that, you can still encounter problems. If you look at U.K., where a gender equality duty was passed in 2007, the government was taken to court by The Fawcett Society and found not to have fulfilled the requirements of the gender equality duty, though the court found that the point was moot.