EU Foreign Policy and Gender: How Does the EU Incorporate Gender in Its External Relations?

The EU has a treaty obligation to promote gender equality through its external relations, and one key tool that it uses to achieve this is gender mainstreaming. This chapter focusses on EU’s gender mainstreaming in the areas of external trade and development aid. While gender mainstreaming was codified as an EU policy in the 1990s, and indeed the EU has repeatedly expressed its commitment at a rhetorical level to promoting gender equality abroad, this chapter identifies a number of shortcomings in this policy field: an instrumentalist and narrow understanding of women and gender issues, a focus on neoliberal policies which often ignores the perspectives of women NGOs, the gendered nature of EU institutions and a lack of competencies at the EU level. These shortcomings have resulted in the EU being unable to fully live up its normative commitments and aims regarding the export of gender equality norms.