Gender discrimination in the spanish labour market and regulation of the public policies

Abstract

Although it is true that the participation rate of women in Spain has increased considerably in recent decades and that significant progress has been made though public policies in regulating gender equality, there are still inequalities and statistics show that Spain is in a relegated position compared with other European countries. The Spanish Organic Act for Effective Equality between Men and Women (2007) is aware of this, by providing in section II of the Preamble that “full recognition of formal equality before the law, while indisputably constituting a decisive step, has proved to be insufficient, since gender violence, wage discrimination, higher female unemployment stand as evidence, among other reasons, that the attainment of full, effective equality between women and men is even today an unfinished task, whose completion calls for further legal instruments”.
Based on these assumptions, this paper aims to show from a legal and economic point of view the situation in which women find themselves compared to men in different fields, but with especial attention to the labour market, and to analyse the effect of the enactment of the aforementioned Organic Act (2007) as well as to identify the aspects on which future public regulations should act to achieve a more effective equality between women and men.