Although the EU has made a firm commitment to gender equality, the financial crisis has exposed the reversibility of the EU’s normative and practical commitments to it. Although the Lisbon Treaty establishes gender equality as a fundamental value and obliges the Union to strive to achieve it in all of its activities, vast areas of EU policy maintain a deafening silence on gender equality, whilst the importance attached to previously well-mainstreamed policy areas, such as employment, is waning. 

This panel asks: 

• How are silences on gender equality constituted and maintained in EU policy? 
• How have the processes intensified or changed since the onset of the economic crisis?
• What are the prospects for a resurgence in EU commitment to gender equality as a fundamental value of the EU?

The papers address these questions by focusing on the way in which gendered policy issues, frames and proposals are ignored in policymaking processes. They examine the role of actors and institutions, and the relation between them, and ask how they constitute the ever-changing EU polity. And they ask whether these silences can be broken: Can gender bounce back onto the European agenda, and if so, how?