Equality between women and men after forty years of the Spanish Constitution

Abstract

Abstract:
This paper analyzes the evolution of effective equality between women and men in legislation and jurisprudence from the formal and material meaning of the constitutional requirement of equality. The prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sex has resulted in the repeal of rules that ignore women in the pursuit of rights or that harm them in real life. However, it has not affected the legal prohibition of multiple discrimination as intersectional discrimination resulting from the confluence of other discriminations with the fact of being a woman. The demand for real and effective equality of women and men has resulted in positive action, repressive actions with a gender perspective and antidiscrimination measures compatible with the requirements of arts. 14 and 9.2 EC. However, effective guarantees of education and training in equality have not been regulated, but rather, voluntary policies that do not translate obligations of prescriptive compliance. Neither is there a transversal regulation of positive actions that allow to eradicate multiple discrimination as qualitatively different discrimination. Likewise, social and scientific evolution has determined the revision of some measures of positive action for women from the perspective of prohibition of discrimination for other subjective reasons (the sexual identity) and from the real objective of labor rights of care: parental co-responsibility of the parents. There is a need to transform some measures of positive action for women (suspension of maternity contract) in rights that can be enjoyed by pregnant women, regardless of sex or sexual identity. It is even determined the need to convert such rights for pregnant women into measures of parental co-responsibility that can be enjoyed indistinctly by both parents.