GENDER EQUALITY POLICIES DURING THE POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIAN SOCIETY - TRANSFORMATION OR CONSERVATION OF GENDER PATRIARCHAL REGIME?

The paper aims to analyze family policies, labor market and social protection policies in the light of their correlated effects on the dynamics of gender relations, to identify such new tools for understanding national realities in European countries and to propose appropriate directions for intervention by programs and policies. The current research on public policies considers that the analysis of family policies, of labor market or social security policies, from the perspective of gender (in)equality, offers relevant indicators with regard to the welfare regimes and quality of democracy or to the democratic deficit in the post-communist Romanian society, placed in the actual European context. This paper attempts to identify the mechanisms through which the state and its public policies reproduce and enhance traditional/conservative cultural models on gender roles and asymmetric social relations between men and women, also they reproduce the restrictive force of classic dichotomies between public-private life or productive-reproductive work. Despite the stated principle of gender equality, public policies maintain hierarchies and gender disparities in Romanian society, as in other European countries. This approach research shows that the complex interaction between cultural models of gender roles in the family/society and public policies is relevant to contextualized analysis of public policies and gender equality policies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of cultural patterns (on family gender roles, labour organization etc.) on public policy (family policies, labor market policies, gender equality policies) in order to advance a set of questions: how do family and gender ideology influence the content of public policy and the conservation of gender regime in post-communist Romanian society? How can gender equality increase through public policies and to what extent is gender mainstreaming approach an appropriate solution in this sense?