Equal opportunities has constituted one of the four pillars of the European
Employment Strategy (EES) as approved at the Luxembourg summit in 1997. However,
there are tensions between the EES and the imperatives of budgetary restraint
(which have caused job losses in public services, where women are
disproportionately employed) and between quantitative targets of increasing
women’s labour-force participation and qualitative targets of
overcoming gender segregation. This article explores these tensions, drawing
evidence from comparative European research and the particular experience of Sweden.
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