Executive Summary

This policy brief argues that formal legal equality is no longer sufficient to achieve real gender equality. While many countries have strengthened laws and aligned with international and European standards, the main challenge is now system performance: whether institutions, services, enforcement mechanisms, and labour markets actually enable women and men to exercise their rights equally in practice.

Using North Macedonia and Slovenia as a comparative case, the brief shows that similar legal commitments can produce different outcomes depending on the strength of care infrastructure, institutional capacity, labour market access, and monitoring systems. Slovenia, as an EU member state, benefits from stronger regulatory, statistical, and implementation frameworks, while North Macedonia remains in a process of institutional consolidation.

The analysis highlights key differences in women’s labour market participation, inactivity rates, entrepreneurship, childcare access, parental leave design, and gender pay gaps. These differences suggest that gender equality depends not only on rights written in law, but on the broader system that supports their implementation.

The brief recommends treating early childhood education and care as economic infrastructure, strengthening parental leave policies to promote shared care responsibilities, improving enforcement through labour inspectorates and equality bodies, expanding reliable gender-disaggregated data, supporting women’s sustainable economic participation, and mainstreaming gender equality across economic, fiscal, social, and EU-integration policies.

In conclusion, the brief emphasizes that equality only on paper is not enough. Sustainable progress requires functioning institutions, accessible services, effective enforcement, and labour markets that translate formal rights into real opportunities.