Conclusion: Rethinking the Double Democratic Deficit of the EU

Since the late 1970s, widening circles of feminist experts and activists have produced a multitude of studies focusing on extensive gender policy developments within the EU. Despite the Community’s reputation as a ‘rich men’s industrial club’, the first wave of European equality activism brought us together, our national, political, class and age differences notwithstanding. Attempts to render European Economic Community (EEC) Treaty provisions both binding and directly effective in the 1970s and 1980s made us realise that we needed ‘data’, lots of them, to overcome entrenched male assertions that ‘there is no problem here, and the problem that there is not is best solved by voluntary agreement’ (Dipak Nandy, cited in Vallance and Davies 1986: 112). Conference papers blossomed into ‘expert reports’ commissioned by the EU itself; at first these were little more than blurred, type-writer manuscripts stapled between flimsy lavender covers that we hauled back in heavy suitcases after research trips to Brussels. Revised reports gave birth to intrepid journal articles and a few books (Vallance and Davies 1986; Springer 1992; Hoskyns 1996). Today there are whole journals and presses specialising in these concerns, voluminous examples of which can be accessed on-line.