Beyond the Numbers: Gender and Careers in the European Commission

From a low base as recently as the 1990s the European Commission has considerably improved the gender imbalance among its staff and significantly increased the proportion of female managers within its workforce, meeting targets set as part of its gender action programme and the recruitment exercise that accompanied the 2004 and 2007 enlargements. However, detailed analysis of the career paths of two large n studies of AD Policy officials (1846 in 2008, and 2399 in 2014) shows that numbers do not tell the whole story. While confirming that the Commission has indeed made important progress over the past two decades, this paper shows, first, that the Commission is more or less at the median point when compared with national administrations in advanced economic states. Second, using a multinomial logit, it shows, contrary to accepted wisdom, that men, not women, were the main beneficiaries of the enlargement recruitment and, when tracking how careers are built across time, that there are important limits to the Commission’s success in bringing about gender equality. The paper explores several hypotheses for the Commission's patchy record.