The Royal Decree 6/2019 for the guarantee of equal treatment and opportunities between women and men in employment and occupation: God and the devil in the land of the sun

Abstract

This paper is a critical commentary on the content and scope of the recently approved Royal Decree 6/2019 for the guarantee of equal treatment and opportunities be­tween women and men in employment and occupation. The positive assessment that, in general, the Royal Decree deserves, is based simply on its mere approval, which reinforces the idea that the issue of effective equality between men and women at work requires specific measures. However, the detailed analysis of the articles of the RDL 6/2019 that is carried out in the work leads the author to the conclusion that the majority of its contents are insufficient and that a global and effectively transversal reform is still pending, capable of effectively ad­vancing in the workplace equality between women and men. The insufficiencies are evident in the treatment that the Royal Decree grants to the equality plans, the permission for the nursing care, the parental leave, the adaptation of the working day or the dependency support fund. The most interesting aspect of the Royal Decree is the protection it sets against dismissal without cause, although it is fundamentally the transposition to the Spanish legal system of the doctrine of the CJEU. The birth permit created by RDL 6/2019 unifying the old maternity and paternity leaves is given special attention in the article, which highlights the need for the Span­ish legal system to establish more committed measures to advance in the co-responsibility between men and women.