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Anagnostou, Dia --- "Gender equality and parity in European national constitutions" [2017] ELECD 844; in Irving, Helen (ed), "Constitutions and Gender" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 268

Book Title: Constitutions and Gender

Editor(s): Irving, Helen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784716950

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Gender equality and parity in European national constitutions

Author(s): Anagnostou, Dia

Number of pages: 22

Abstract/Description:

This chapter explores how processes of social and legal mobilization have influenced and transformed national constitutional parameters of gender equality in Europe. It analyses the social-legal and discursive strategies that women’s organizations and feminist groups in different European countries have deployed to challenge constitutional provisions of formal equality and to advance ideas of substantive equality. Section 10.2 briefly depicts constitutions as frames of feminist discourse and action. It also describes and analyses different constitutional conceptions of formal and substantive gender equality, as well as the notion of parity that is increasingly appealing in some countries. Section 10.3 examines the constitutional provisions of gender equality in four countries – Germany, Greece, France and Belgium – and the strategies deployed by feminists and women’s organizations to pursue the amendment of those provisions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The last section, 10.4, discusses the significance and consequences of constitutional provisions that recognize a substantive conception of gender equality. It also points to the need for theoretically informed socio-legal and comparative research on the multi-faceted ways in which constitutional norms of gender equality both influence and are constantly (re)shaped by social activism, judicial interpretations and public discourse.