Gender in Political Economy and EU Law

Since the 1970s, the European Union (EU) has significantly invested in gender equality measures to tackle multiple forms of discrimination that – among others—women face in the labour market. Although the EU's primary mode of legal intervention has been geared towards the organisation of the market, a robust analysis in terms of global political economy and critique of global capitalism asking how EU law constitutes markets in relation to gendered power relations is still missing in EU law and is, to a large extent, marginalised in the emergent ‘law and political economy’ scholarship in Europe. This short essay explores how the gender in political economy and law approach can shed light on the gendered nature of markets and the distributive effects of EU law along gender, class, race and ethnicity lines. It illustrates some of these methodological moves using examples from EU anti-discrimination and equality law.