Empowering women in trade: how gender responsive are the EU's trade agreements?

It is widely acknowledged that achieving gender equality is key to the creation of inclusive and sustainable regimes. Over the past five years, there has been a renewed focus on how trade impacts gender equality and women and the purpose of this chapter is to critically assess the gender responsiveness of the EU's external trade policies. While the EU's existing trade agreements display a limited level of gender responsiveness, with the gender clauses leading to a negligible impact on the empowerment of women, the EU's modernised agreements exhibit evolving and advanced gender responsiveness. This chapter argues that this paradigmatic shift, which embeds gender equality in a more explicit way, signals a progressive step in the EU's trade policy. However, until the challenges associated with measuring the impacts of trade on gender can be overcome, the transformative potential of the EU's gender responsive trade policy will be limited.