Framing gender equality in the European Union and its current and future Member States. Deliverable No. 61: Final LARG Report.

LARG started off from the premise that the concept of gender equality in the current European political space is dynamic and contested: it takes on different meanings in different spatiotemporal contexts (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009), depending on policy fields, the protagonists articulating them, and the interaction of multiple contextual factors. The main aims of the LARG activity were twofold: to map these multiple meanings of gender equality in 29 countries and the European Union and across a variety of policy fields that are highly relevant from the point of view of gender equality, and to understand the standing and voice of civil society in gender equality texts and in the process of contestation leading to the articulation of these meanings. The LARG activity set out in its proposal to conduct a comparative analysis of the differences, similarities and inconsistencies in the field of gender+ equality policies between the EU and its (present and future) Member States. LARG was conceived to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of these policies in terms of their design and content, giving particular attention to the standing and voice of civil society in the debates. The three QUING project objectives that LARG responded to were: · Assessing the content and quality of gender+ equality policies in the EU’s multicultural context; · Assessing the standing and voice of civil society in gender + equality policies; and · Explaining deficiencies, deviations and inconsistencies in EU and Member State’s gender+ equality policies. The activity thus had three major research questions to answer: · How can gender equality frames in the EU and its current and future Member States be systematically described? · What is the standing and voice present in gender equality policies? · What are the differences, similarities and inconsistencies in gender equality policies between the EU and its Member States? Along with answering these questions, LARG also set out to make a methodological contribution by developing an innovative methodology of frame analysis complemented with voice analysis. This methodology can be applied to a large set of countries in responding to the proposed research questions.