Professional Documents
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Gender and The Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality
Gender and The Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality
Economic Crisis
in Europe
Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality
Edited by
Johanna Kantola
Emanuela Lombardo
Gender and Politics
Series Editors
Johanna Kantola
Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Sarah Childs
Professor of Politics and Gender
University of Bristol
Bristol, United Kingdom
The Gender and Politics series celebrates its 5th anniversary at the 4th
European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in June 2015 in
Uppsala, Sweden. The original idea for the book series was envisioned by
the series editors Johanna Kantola and Judith Squires at the first ECPG in
Belfast in 2009, and the series was officially launched at the Conference
in Budapest in 2011. In 2014, Sarah Childs became the co-editor of the
series, together with Johanna Kantola. Gender and Politics showcases the
very best international writing. It publishes world class monographs and
edited collections from scholars - junior and well established - working
in politics, international relations and public policy, with specific refer-
ence to questions of gender. The 15 titles that have come out over the
past five years make key contributions to debates on intersectionality and
diversity, gender equality, social movements, Europeanization and institu-
tionalism, governance and norms, policies, and political institutions. Set
in European, US and Latin American contexts, these books provide rich
new empirical findings and push forward boundaries of feminist and poli-
tics conceptual and theoretical research. The editors welcome the highest
quality international research on these topics and beyond, and look for
proposals on feminist political theory; on recent political transformations
such as the economic crisis or the rise of the populist right; as well as pro-
posals on continuing feminist dilemmas around participation and repre-
sentation, specific gendered policy fields, and policy making mechanisms.
The series can also include books published as a Palgrave pivot.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Note
1. ‘Against Patriarchal and Capitalist Attacks: Feminist Disobedience!’
(translation from the Catalan).
Contents
ix
x Contents
Index271
List of Contributors
xi
xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Policies and Politics in America and Britain, was published in 2015. Her forth-
coming co-authored book, with Leah Bassel, is The Politics of Survival: Minority
Women, Activism and Austerity in France and Britain.
Roberta Guerrina is Professor in Politics and Head of the School at the University
of Surrey. She is a specialist in gender politics, with a particular interest in women,
peace and security, EU politics and social policy, citizenship and gender equality.
She has published in the area of women’s human rights, work-life balance, identity
politics and the idea of Europe. She is the author of Mothering the Union (2005)
and Europe: History, Ideas and Ideologies (2002). Her work has appeared in
International Affairs, Women’s Studies International Forum and Review of
International Studies.
Johanna Kantola is Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki. Her
books include Gender and Political Analysis (with Lombardo, Palgrave 2017),
Gender and the European Union (Palgrave, 2010) and Feminists Theorize the State
(Palgrave, 2006). She is one of the editors of The Oxford Handbook on Gender and
Politics (2013) and Palgrave Gender and Politics Book Series.
Emanuela Lombardo is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science
and Administration 2 of Madrid Complutense University in Spain. Her latest
books are Gender and Political Analysis (with Johanna Kantola, Palgrave 2017)
and The Symbolic Representation of Gender (with Petra Meier, 2014). Recent arti-
cles can be found in Politics, European Political Science, Gender, Work and
Organization, and Comparative European Politics.
Heather MacRae holds a PhD from Carlton University, and she is the Jean
Monnet Chair in European Integration and Associate Professor in Political Science
at York University, Canada. Her research focuses on gender politics in the European
Union. She recently co-edited the volume, Gendering European Integration
Theory: Engaging New Dialogues (2016), with Gabriele Abels. Her articles have
appeared in journals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, West European
Politics and Women’s Studies International Forum.
Ana Prata is Assistant Professor at California State University Northridge,
United States. She specializes in European women’s movements, political repre-
sentation, gender and democratization, and issues of bodily citizenship. She is
currently working on a research project entitled ‘Southern European Women and
the Economic Crisis – Assessing Problems, Policies and Practices’.
Elaine Weiner (2003, PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is Associate
Professor in Sociology at McGill University, Canada. Her research interests lie at
the intersection of gender, work and Central and East European societies. She is
the author of Market Dreams: Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic
(2007). She has published in European Journal of Women’s Studies, European
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Integration Online Papers, Social Problems, Social Politics, and Women’s Studies
International Forum.
Stefanie Wöhl Dr phil., is Senior Lecturer and Head of the City of Vienna
Competence Team on European and International Studies at the University of
Applied Sciences BFI, Austria. Her research interests and publications focus on
European integration, gender, international political economy and state
transformations.
Ania Zbyszewska is Assistant Professor at the Warwick Law School. She researches
on regulation of work, law and gender, and law and politics in EU context and in
times of ‘transition’. She authored Gendering European Working Time Regimes:
The Working Time Directive and the Case of Poland (2016).
List of Figures
xv
List of Tables
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo
Introduction
Since 2008 the Western world has lived through one of its most serious
economic crises. What started as a financial crisis in the US with the col-
lapse of the Lehman Brothers, spread to Europe as a general banking cri-
sis that brought down national economies of countries such as Iceland,
Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. The gendered consequences
of the crisis are significant and are analysed in gender scholarship from
different disciplines. Feminist economists show that as a result of the
cuts to the public sector services, benefits and jobs, women’s unemploy-
ment, poverty and discrimination have increased across the countries
with minority women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds or
with disabilities being disproportionately affected (Karamessini 2014a;
J. Kantola (*)
Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of
Helsinki, Finland
E. Lombardo
Department of Political Science and Administration 2, Faculty of Political
Science and Sociology, Madrid Complutense University, Spain
deconstruction of gender and the crisis (see also Kantola and Lombardo
2017a, b). The adoption of any of these approaches changes one’s defini-
tion on the key concepts of this book—politics, institutions and intersec-
tionality—and one’s definition of the crisis itself. The distinctions between
the approaches are analytical as most research combines them in a quest
to answer empirical real world puzzles. We suggest that analytically frame-
works such as these help to discuss the underpinnings of the approaches
and their compatibility.
A number of feminist economists map the effects of the crisis on women
by using an approach that we call a women and the crisis approach. This sig-
nifies analysing the different waves of the crisis where men’s employment
in the private sector, for example, in construction businesses, was worst
hit at first, and how in the second wave, the public sector cuts started to
erase women’s jobs, as well as the public sector services and benefits that
women relied on (Bettio et al. 2012; Karamessini and Rubery 2014). In
the field of politics, this has signified studying the numbers of women
and men in economic decision-making and banking. Walby’s (2015: 57)
question, ‘Would the financial crisis have been different if it had been
Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers?’, makes us ask whether a
more diverse composition of corporate boards would have moved financial
leaders to take less risky decisions (for a critical discussion see Prügl 2016;
True 2016). Feminist scholars have argued that it has been a men’s crisis
in the sense that men have been the dominant actors in the institutions
that have inflicted the crisis and attempted to solve it (Pearson and Elson
2015: 14). Whilst taking ‘women’ and ‘men’ as relatively unproblematic
and unitary categories, the approach has the strength of providing fac-
tual evidence for policy makers about statistical patterns of the crisis as
well as arguments for activists about who is represented in the institutions
involved in solving the crisis and whose voice is heard in policy making.
Second, a lot of the feminist research draws upon a gender and the crisis
approach where the focus is on the gendered impacts on the crisis. A focus
on gender as opposed to women calls for an understanding of the wider
societal structures that reproduce the continuing patterns of domination
and inequality. Gender norms underpin the three spheres of economy:
finance, production and reproduction resulting in women’s overconcen-
tration in the reproductive sphere (Pearson and Elson 2015: 10). The
neoliberal policy solutions to the crisis that require cutting down the
public sector rely on and reproduce traditional gender roles that delegate
major responsibility of care for women. This leads to shifts in the national
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN EUROPE 5
and European gender regimes (Walby 2011, 2015) and the EU austerity
policies represent a ‘critical juncture’ that could revert long-term progress
achieved in gender equality in Europe (Rubery 2014). Gender policies—
including gender mainstreaming in the EU—and gender equality institu-
tions have been downscaled in a number of countries at a time when they
would be needed the most to counter the gendered effects of the crisis
(Klatzer and Schlager 2014). A gender analysis that illustrates the patterns
of the feminization of poverty and increases in gender violence points to
the ways in which the economic, political and social consequences of the
crisis are gendered in complex ways. At the same time there is increasing
space in gender and crisis approaches to understand how gender intersects
with other categories of inequality such as race and ethnicity, disability and
class to result in differentiated impacts of the crisis.
Third, deconstruction of gender and the crisis approach discerns the ways
in which the crisis is discursively constructed and how these construc-
tions are gendered and gendering. The approach makes it possible to
understand how some solutions are favoured over others and how gen-
der is silenced, sidelined or employed in particular ways. In other words,
discursive constructions of gender offer particular subject positions and
close off others. These constructions have effects, they can politicize or
de-politicize the crisis in particular ways and they impact on perceived
solutions. With this feminist approach scholars inquire: who defines and
narrates the crisis, and how is the crisis constitutive of new and old politi-
cal identities, institutions and practices? (See Hozic and True 2016: 14.)
How is knowledge about the crises conditioned and informed by pat-
terns of power? (Griffin 2016: 180). Penny Griffin suggests that there is
a prevalence of governance responses that ‘centralise women’s “essential”
domesticity or fiscal prudence, prevailing representations of men as public
figures of authority and responsibility, and techniques of governance that
exploit these’ (Griffin 2015: 55). Such techniques include, according to
Griffin, gender quota systems based on the assumption that the presence
of women’s bodies balances out hypermasculine behaviour, or austerity
measures that are instituted on the foundational assumption of women’s
reproductive work as inferred but unpaid.
Fourth, intersectionality approaches explore the inequalities, marginal-
izations and dominations that the interactions of gender, race, class and
other systems of inequality produce in times of crisis, such as the differen-
tiated impact of austerity policies on migrant minoritized women or men
(Bettio et al. 2012), female refugees in countries like Greece (Athanasiou
6 J. KANTOLA AND E. LOMBARDO
2014) and younger unemployed women and older women who see their
pensions reduced or cut (Bettio et al. 2012; Karamessini and Rubery
2014). Heteronormativity is deeply implicated in the dominant narratives
about the economic, social and political crises although their implications
are detrimental to LGBTQ communities (Smith 2016: 231–232). For
example, in the UK, there has been a silence about the impact of the
government’s austerity policies on sexual injustices with the issue of same-
sex marriage dominating the agenda (Smith 2016: 232). Intersectionality
shows how different organizations and movements representing differ-
ent groups can be pitted against one another in a seeming competition
for scarcer resources, or, alternatively it can point to new alliances and
solidarity at times of crisis (Bassel and Emejulu 2014). Populist right par-
ties seeking to protect ‘our people’ can resort to racist or even fascist dis-
courses that challenge the human rights of racialized others in European
countries (Norocel 2013). European media and politicians continue to
demonize Greeks as ‘whites but not quite’ drawing on racialized construc-
tions of otherness, underpinned by presumed ‘laziness’ and ‘criminality’
(Agathangelou 2016: 208).
Finally, post-deconstruction and the crisis approach has yet to enter
gender and politics research (see Kantola and Lombardo 2017a). We
use the term post-deconstruction to signal a diverse set of debates on
feminist new materialism, corporealism and affect theory that come ana-
lytically (not chronologically, Lykke 2010: 106) ‘after’ reflections on the
deconstruction of gender (Ahmed 2004; Hemmings 2005; Liljeström
and Paasonen 2010). These approaches are interested in understand-
ing what affects, emotions and bodily material do in gender and poli-
tics, beyond discourses. The economic crisis makes the analysis of issues
such as the material underpinning of the current political economy, its
entrenched relations to neoliberalism, states’ biopolitics and emotions
and affects and their bodily impacts particularly important (Coole and
Frost 2010; Athanasiou 2014). Emotions and affects, such as anger,
shame, guilt and empathy circulate in the economic crisis—think of the
rage of Spain’s Indignados movement and how important these emotions
are to understand socio-political developments around the crisis. Post-
deconstruction analyses suggest that these emotions are not individual
but social and involve power relations (Ahmed 2004). For instance,
the neoliberal ‘austerity’ agenda has been accompanied by a moralizing
discourse ‘that passes on the responsibility to citizens together with a
feeling of guilt, making easier for governments to impose public expen-
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN EUROPE 7
Authors in this book take different perspectives on gender and the pol-
itics of the crisis. While we have not suggested a particular theoretical
framework or gender approach to them, we asked them to be reflexive of
the theories that underpin their analyses of the crisis. We have, instead,
focused on three issues that, in our view, significantly capture the political
dimension of the crisis from gender perspectives: (i) austerity politics and
institutional and policy changes in the EU before and after the 2008 eco-
nomic crisis from the analytical perspective of gender and intersectionality;
(ii) the political dynamics of interaction between the EU and the member
states or the Europeanization of gender equality and policies in times of
crisis and (iii) the gender and intersectional patterns of resistances and
struggles against austerity politics.
specific member states (Villa and Smith 2014). Even the European
Economic Recovery Plan makes no mention of ‘gender’, ‘women’ or ‘equal-
ity’, a fact that was criticized by the Commission’s Advisory Committee on
Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. As gender experts denounce,
‘the “urgency” of a response to the crisis seems to have pushed gender
mainstreaming further down the priority list’, including the basic presenta-
tion of gender-disaggregated statistical data (Bettio et al. 2012: 97–98).
Despite broad consensus in the European Parliament’s FEMM Committee
(Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee) about the importance
of tackling the gendered aspects of the crisis, political contestations came
into play and shattered this consensus between the diverse political groups
about the importance of gender perspective further undermining the role
of the European Parliament in promoting a gender perspective to the aus-
terity politics (Kantola and Rolandsen Agustin 2016).
In Chap. 2, Sophie Jacquot analyses the fate of the EU gender policy
in the midst of the economic crisis and arrives at a rather bleak conclusion.
The economic crisis has exacerbated the already ongoing stagnation in EU
gender policy (see Jacquot in this volume). Parallel to the shifts in the EU
macroeconomic governance regime in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, EU
gender equality policies experienced a number of institutional and policy
shifts that locate the EU as ‘the most striking example of a U-turn in the
importance attached to gender equality as a social goal’ (Karamessini and
Rubery 2014: 333). Although gender was not effectively mainstreamed
into the EU macroeconomic policies even before the crisis, as Villa and
Smith (2014) argue, it was indeed mainstreamed in the EU employment
policies in the 1990s through the European Employment Strategies.
However, the EU has shifted its priorities and gender equality is not
treated as a social goal and it is not integrated in employment policies any
longer. The shift in context, according to Villa and Smith (2014) helps to
understand this gender invisibility in the EU employment agenda. In the
1990s, the rise in women’s employment improved labour market perfor-
mance in the member states and was thus considered important for the
EU economy, the neoliberal model was accompanied by developments in
the social democratic model, and the entry of gender equality supporters
such as Sweden and Finland all favoured the integration of gender into
the EU employment policies. The economic crisis context is less favour-
able to gender equality, not only due to a stronger neoliberal ideology
in member governments, but also because ‘the key actors in favour of
gender equality had been sidelined both internally in the Commission and
12 J. KANTOLA AND E. LOMBARDO
e xternally among member states’ (Villa and Smith 2014: 288), a develop-
ment we discuss in more detail below.
In this respect, a significant shift in the institutionalization of gender
equality in the EU occurred in the EC in January 2011, when responsibil-
ity for gender equality moved from DG Employment, Social Affairs and
Equal Opportunities to DG Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship,
together with two dedicated units on gender equality policies and on legal
matters in equal treatment. The responsibility for gender equality in the
workplace is still in DG Employment, but there is no longer a dedicated
unit on gender equality left in the DG (Woodward and Van der Vleuten
2014). This administrative shift, which occurred in the second Barroso
Commission in 2010, unrooted the portfolio for equal opportunity and
non-discrimination from their traditional base in DG Employment and
Social Affairs, provoking deep political and strategic consequences on EU
gender equality policies (Jacquot 2015).
The shift might be detrimental to gendering European integration in a
moment in which a new EU economic governance regime is being built in
response to the 2008 financial crisis to strengthen the coordination of national
economic, labour market and social policies (Klatzer and Schlager 2014). It
came precisely at the time in which the Council and the Commission, through
mechanisms such as the European Semester and the ‘Six-pack legislation’,
tightened control over member states’ economic and employment policies,
with the consequence that the institutional shift of gender equality from DG
Employment to DG Justice ‘distanced gender equality from employment
policy and spread gender equality input thinly across the Commission’ (Villa
and Smith 2014: 288). This could weaken the EU Equal Opportunities
unit’s capacity of mainstreaming gender into economic and social initiatives.
While the institutional shift from DG Employment to DG Justice
boosted new developments in ‘justice’, evident in the legally bind-
ing directives2 against gender-based violence, Jacquot (2015 and in this
volume) argues that it contributed to locate gender equality even more
within a legal perspective of rights, and it changed the interconnected-
ness of the administrative, political, academic and activist actors specific
to the functioning of the ‘velvet triangle’ of EU gender equality policy
(Woodward 2004). In relation to the rights-approach, the change risks to
address EU gender equality only through a reactive, individually based,
anti- discrimination approach, rather than through a proactive, group-
based, preventive approach, as that exemplified by positive action and gen-
der mainstreaming measures (Lombardo and Bustelo 2012). With respect
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN EUROPE 13
to the gender expert networks, the shift destabilized the ‘velvet tri-
angles’ constructed around DG Employment in decades because some
of the historical experts were specialist in gender discrimination in the
labour market. It also promoted a more managerial approach in which
the Commission considered these experts, rationalized in 2011 from the
former three networks (Legal Experts Network, EGGE Expert Group
on Gender and Employment and EGGSIE Expert Group on Gender,
Social Exclusion, Health and Long-Term Care) into one single network
as European Network of Experts on Gender Equality ENEGE, to save
costs and improve management. Moreover, the gender expert networks
are hired to provide information and services to the Commission rather
than as scientific and legal experts that advise the Commission on how to
advance the cause of gender equality, as they formerly did (Jacquot in this
volume).
The increased weight of member states in times of economic and insti-
tutional crisis, with a greater role of the Council of Ministers, also blocked
developments in EU gender equality policies, as exemplified in the with-
drawal of the revision of the maternity leave directive proposal and the
blockage of the women on corporate boards directive proposal (Jacquot in
this volume). The enlargement to Central and Eastern European countries
further favoured the spread of neoliberal ideologies and, in some cases,
more traditional notions of gender equality (see chapter on Poland by
Zbyszewska in this volume; Villa and Smith 2014: 288). This shifting con-
text, radicalized by the urgency to respond to the Eurozone crisis, tilted
the balance between economic and egalitarian goals towards a promo-
tion of neoliberal economic goals. In the crisis context the EU shifted its
priorities and seemed to forget its commitments to gender equality goals
(Karamessini and Rubery 2014).
labour market, thus dual earner households are currently resisting, though
in conditions of increased labour exploitation for both women and men,
and care exploitation for women (Walby 2015). In Poland, despite a com-
paratively good economic performance at the outset of the crisis, the gov-
ernment imposed strict austerity policies, unpopular to citizens and labour
unions and detrimental to women due to the increased privatization of
care provoked by public cuts. Polish politicians’ willingness to belong to
the ‘EU neoliberal vanguard’ revealed that the crisis was functional to
the consolidation of the country’s ongoing neoliberal reform project (see
Zbyszewska in this volume). Even in the Nordic countries, such as Finland,
neoliberal austerity politics have arrived later than in other European states
but in 2015 have hit the women-friendly welfare state with severe cuts in
the public budget that will shift the burden of care from the state to fami-
lies, that is, women (see Elomäki and Kantola in this volume). There too
the ‘political usage of the EU’ is discernible, namely justifying domestic
austerity politics informed by political ideologies of governing parties with
reference to the EU requirements (Kantola 2015).
The EU-member states dynamics in times of crisis has also implied
a turn to conservatism and de-democratization in the member states,
which have gendered and racialized consequences (Verloo forthcoming).
Governments of the member states worked to formulate austerity politics
out of the reach of public democratic debate and civil society contesta-
tions. From Finland to Spain, governments of the member states adopted
new laws to transpose the EU requirements about limits to budget deficit
into national law, with negative consequences for women, who are espe-
cially affected by public cuts, and for social and gender equality policies. In
Spain, the undemocratic reaction of the conservative government to citi-
zens’ anti-austerity struggles has been a restriction of freedom of expres-
sion and other human rights through the 2014 ‘Law of citizens’ safety’,
which civil society has strongly opposed, renaming it the ‘Gag law’ (see
Lombardo in this book).
In Finland, the 2015 conservative right government combined a neo-
liberal programme of austerity politics with conservatism and racism,
especially promoted by the populist right party The Finns in the coalition
government, with detrimental consequences to gender equality and gen-
der equality policies. The Finns party adopted anti-immigration policies,
refused to agree to the European common compulsory refugee alloca-
tion policy and a quota mechanism during the 2015 refugees’ crisis, and
developed a gendered racist rhetoric in which Finnish women were to
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN EUROPE 17
be protected from the violence of other culture’s men (see Elomäki and
Kantola in this volume). In UK and France, minority women’s daily expe-
riences of economic, social, gender and race inequality before and after
the 2008 crisis move Emejulu and Bassel (in this volume) to speak of
‘routinised crises’, that is ‘persistent, institutionalised and ordinary hard-
ships in everyday life’. As the authors write: minority women’s ‘persis-
tently high unemployment and poverty rates are not “exceptional” and
not necessarily problems to be addressed through policy action since they
are indicators of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy operating as
intended. Once we understand minority women’s precarity as the banality
of everyday life we can begin to understand the fallacy of the construction
of the 2008 economic “crisis”.’ The crucial question that intersectional
analyses of the crisis such as Emejulu and Bassel raise is: a crisis for whom?
role of providing gender expertise into existing policies rather than engag-
ing in more radical political forms of critique. Although one could inter-
pret the economic crisis as a crisis of neoliberalism, this has not been the
case (Crouch 2011). Instead neoliberal economic policies have become
entrenched as discussed above in relation to the EU. On the one hand,
this could have the potential to transform feminist resistance: new forms
of feminist autonomous movements appear (see Elomäki and Kantola in
this volume), and the strengthening of national and international femi-
nist alliances (Lombardo in this volume). On the other hand, the cri-
sis may generate new challenges for feminist and intersectional struggles
for equality in the harder political climate (see Emejulu and Bassel; and
Jacquot in this volume).
As formerly noted, austerity politics in the EU has been accompanied
with a trend of de-democratization. The new forms of economic gover-
nance—discussed above—are closed off from democratic debate, partici-
pation and civil society lobbying. It has indeed become harder for many
feminist organizations to lobby governments and the EU. As economic
austerity discourses are dominant equality needs to give way to the per-
ceived economic necessities. There is a powerful discursive construction
of exceptional times when equality cannot be afforded and is for the good
times. Moreover, changes in the new economic governance regime of the
EU and new undemocratic regulations in the member states, such as the
constitutional securing of the annual budget deficit below 3 % and the
‘gag law’ in Spain, have made political institutions especially impenetrable
for citizens and activists.
The hard climate of neoliberalism and austerity has been combined
with overt racism in European societies, brought to the surface with the
so-called refugee crisis since 2015 and, for example, the UK’s Brexit vote
in 2016, and gender conservatism pushing women away from the labour
market. Whilst institutional racism has underpinned European societies
before the crisis, few would dispute that racist incidents have surfaced
across Europe and been legitimized by the radical right politics of politi-
cal leaders. In their chapter, Emejulu and Bassel (in this volume) show
how minority women’s struggles for equality have been made harder and
more invisible in such a context. At the same time, these negative trends
in terms of feminist organizing may spark new forms of activism and alli-
ances, which has been the case in a number of European countries includ-
ing Spain and Finland (see Elomäki and Kantola; and Lombardo in this
volume).
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN EUROPE 19
As a result of the economic crisis NGO and civil society funds have
been reduced at national and European levels with very concrete conse-
quences for feminist resistance and lobbying. This is not a unified trend as
some actors might have benefited and others not. In her chapter, Sophie
Jacquot (in this volume) suggests that competition is rife at the EU level
between organizations in the areas of gender equality, anti-discrimination
and social inclusion and protection for the decreasing levels of funding.
Citing Pauline Cullen’s research (Cullen 2014) she suggests that the once
powerful European Women’s Lobby (EWL) may be one of the organiza-
tions that has lost some of its former legitimacy and power.
Notes
1. See http://ec.europea.eu/europa2020.
2. Directive 2011/99/EU of The European Parliament and of the
Council 2011 on the European protection order. Directive
2012/29/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25
October 2012 establishing minimum standards on the rights, sup-
port and protection of victims of crime.
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Karamessini, Maria. 2014a. Introduction—Women’s Vulnerability to Recession
and Austerity. A Different Context, a Different Crisis. In Women and Austerity:
The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, ed. Maria Karamessini
and Jill Rubery, 3–16. London: Routledge.
———. 2014b. Structural Crisis and Adjustment in Greece: Social Regression and
the Challenge to Gender Equality. In Women and Austerity: The Economic
Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality I, ed. Maria Karamessini and Jill
Rubery, 165–185. London: Routledge.
Karamessini, Maria, and Jill Rubery. 2014. Women and Austerity. The Economic
Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality. London and New York: Routledge.
Klatzer, Elisabeth, and Christa Schlager. 2014. Feminist Perspectives on
Macroeconomics: Reconfiguration of Power Structures and Erosion of
Gender Equality Through the New Economic Governance Regime in the
European Union. In Feminist Theory Handbook, ed. Mary Evans, Clare
Hemmings, Marsha Henry, Sumi Madhok, and Sadie Waring, 483–499.
London: SAGE.
Lahey, Kathleen, and Paloma de Villota. 2013. Economic Crisis, Gender Equality,
and Policy Responses in Spain and Canada. Feminist Economics 19(3): 82–107.
Liebert, Ulrike, ed. 2003. Gendering Europeanization. Brussels: Peter Lang.
24 J. KANTOLA AND E. LOMBARDO
Rubery, Jill. 2014. From Women and Recession to Women and Austerity: A
Framework for Analysis. In Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the
Future for Gender Equality, ed. Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 17–36.
London: Routledge.
Smith, Nicola. 2016. Toward a Queer Political Economy of the Crisis. In
Scandalous Economics. Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises, ed. Aida
A. Hozic and Jacqui True, 231–247. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
True, Jacqui. 2016. The Global Financial Crisis’s Silver Bullet: Women Leaders
and “Leaning In”. In Scandalous Economics. Gender and the Politics of Financial
Crises, ed. Aida A. Hozic and Jacqui True, 41–56. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Verashchagina, Alina, and Marina Capparucci. 2014. Living Through the Crisis in
Italy: The Labour Market Experiences of Women and Men. In Women and
Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, ed. Maria
Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 248–270. London: Routledge.
Verloo, Mieke. forthcoming. The Challenge of Gender Inequality. In Democracy
and Equality, edited by Richard Bellamy and Wolfgang Merkel.
Villa, Paola and Mark Smith. 2011. National Reform Programmes 2011: A Gender
Perspective. External report Commissioned by and Presented to the European
Commission Directorate-General for Justice, Unit D1 “Equality between men
and women”.
Villa, Paola, and Mark Smith. 2014. Policy in the Time of Crisis: Employment
Policy and Gender Equality in Europe. In Women and Austerity: The Economic
Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, ed. Maria Karamessini and Jill
Rubery, 273–294. London: Routledge.
Walby, Sylvia. 2009. Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested
Modernities. London: Sage.
———. 2011. The Future of Feminism. Cambridge: Polity press.
———. 2015. Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wöhl, Stefanie. 2014. The State and Gender Relations in International Political
Economy: A State-theoretical Approach to Varieties of Capitalism in Crisis.
Capital & Class 38(1): 83–95.
Woodward, Alison. 2004. Building Velvet Triangles: Gender and Informal
Governance. In Informal Governance and the European Union, ed. Thomas
Christiansen and Simona Piattoni, 76–93. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Woodward, Alison, and Anna van der Vleuten. 2014. EU and the Export of
Gender Equality Norms: Myth and Facts. In Gender equality norms in regional
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Roggeband, 67–92. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
CHAPTER 2
Sophie Jacquot
Introduction
S. Jacquot (*)
CEVIPOL, ULB,
Avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Born out of the failure of the proposed Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty,
signed on 13 December 2007 is often presented as an important step in
the recognition of the importance of the principle of gender equality and
non-discrimination. Although it provides a reminder of the place of equal-
ity in the values and missions of the EU, the modifications that it brings
to the European normative framework and the general approach to this
question remain very limited (Ellis 2010).
However, rather than on primary law, the impact of the crisis is to be
found in the legal domain in secondary law. If the period leading up to
the signature of the Lisbon Treaty can be characterised by a difficulty
in legislating, the period that followed was no different. Indeed this dif-
ficulty was even accentuated, but with the added justification of the eco-
nomic crisis to explain the blockage of texts and the adoption of minimal
requirements. Since the recast directive of 2006 (2006/54/EC), two
directives linked to the question of gender equality in the labour market
were voted in 2010. One took up the Framework Agreement on parental
leave negotiated by the social partners (Directive 2010/18/EU) and the
other dealt with equal treatment of self-employed workers and contrib-
uting spouses (Directive 2010/41/EU). These texts constitute revisions
to existing directives: that of 1996 on parental leave which had already
taken up a Framework Agreement by European social partners (86/613/
EEC), and that of 1986 on women and men in self-employed activities
(86/34/EEC). Their main acquis was the right to parental leave which
was extended from three to four months for each parent occupying a pro-
fessional activity, one month of which could not be transferred to the
other parent. It also established the right to maternity benefits for self-
employed women or the spouses and life partners of self-employed work-
ers. However, although these two directives laid out minimal requirements
and contained dispositions that brought certain improvements compared
to the previous texts, they were “rather weak” overall (Burri and Prechal
2010: 13) and the object of bitter negotiations—the employers invoking
the economic crisis as an argument in order to contain requirements to a
strict minimum.
The crisis and the “necessary” austerity measures were also at the heart
of the blockage of the proposition concerning the modification of direc-
tive 92/85/EEC on maternity protection. The revision of the “maternity
directive” seems characteristic of legislation in the area of gender equal-
ity in the labour market since the mid-2000s—involving the revision of
A POLICY IN CRISIS. THE DISMANTLING OF THE EU GENDER EQUALITY POLICY 31
favour of integrating the gender dimension into all the EU’s development
programmes and policies. In sum, the process of rationalisation largely
amounts to a severe reduction of the gender equality-specific budget and
of the visibility of public problems linked to gender inequalities.
An equivalent dismantling process has also been at work concerning
the third pillar of gender equality policy, that is to say, coordination
instruments. This process is caused partly by the near-total evaporation
of concern with the fight against gender-based inequalities in the major
multiannual action plans of the EU. It is also partly caused by the weak-
ening of the gender mainstreaming strategy and its operational mecha-
nisms. Adopted in 2010, the Europe 2020 strategy followed on from the
Lisbon Strategy (2000–2005, and then in its revised form 2005–2010)
in order to coordinate the economic policies of the EU member states.
In terms of gender equality, although we can see continuity between the
Lisbon Strategy and Europe 2020, it takes the form of an increasingly
significant decline in the place of these questions within macro-level
coordination. The Lisbon Strategy had already contributed to progres-
sively erasing the specific problems women face in the labour market, in
favour of a model centred on a neutral “adult worker” (Annesley 2007;
Jenson 2008). With Europe 2020, the importance of taking gender
into account was so diminished as to nearly disappear entirely. Although
there are a few mentions of the specific situation of women in the labour
market, or elderly women in terms of poverty, scattered throughout the
Commission’s Communication on the subject,6 the awareness of this
situation is never integrated into the rationale, the objectives or even
the indicators of the Europe 2020 strategy. The employment rate objec-
tive itself is a neutral, exclusively quantitative goal, set at 75 % for the
whole population aged between 20 and 64 years old. Moreover there
is no mention of a general commitment to gender mainstreaming, as
was the case in the Lisbon Strategy. This means that gender inequalities
are not considered in the evaluation of national policies and in macro-
economic developments or in the elaboration of recommendations for
member states. Nor are they taken into account in the National Reform
Programmes or even in the other coordination processes that are now
contained within the Europe 2020 strategy (such as the employment and
social open method of coordination processes).
One of the goals of implementing gender mainstreaming was that gen-
der would become part of “normal” public policies and be integrated in
the typical European political process. In this respect, it seems—rather
34 S. JACQUOT
The creation of this agency is thus part of a general trend towards depoliti-
cisation linked to a managerial dynamic that affects all of the organisations
responsible for equality, as well as a certain number of feminist organisa-
tions. In this context the Institute is made to produce technical knowledge
rather than to develop alternatives or a political vision8—even though it
was initially created to produce and distribute feminist expertise.
Another important change in the structure of the EU gender equality
policy since a decade has to do with an increasingly strong presence of
the member states in the design and monitoring of the policy. Over the
course of the period leading up to the Lisbon Treaty, the autonomy that
characterised European gender equality policy up until the beginning of
the 1990s—particularly within the European Commission—was progres-
sively questioned and normalised, notably due to the strong implication
of member states in piloting this policy from the beginning of the 2000s.
Today, we observe that the role of the three Presidencies in setting the
agenda in terms of gender equality has further increased, as has that of
the High Level Group on Gender Mainstreaming presided over by the
Commission but constituted of representatives of member states. It is the
latter that emerges as the strategic place for directing gender equality pol-
icy at the European level. However, although the role of the High Level
Group became more important in this period, the primary instance was
above all the Council of Ministers.
Although the general tendency towards an increased presence of mem-
ber states in the definition of gender equality policy was accentuated, this
was above all linked to a general context which affected all of the activities
of the EU. The increasing weight of member states was not so much due
to a specific desire to gain control of a policy that had escaped them—as
might have been the case in the previous period—as due to a more circum-
stantial conjuncture of the economic, budgetary and institutional crisis.
It is this situation, as well as the increased diversity in national gender
regimes, which more directly explains both the blockages in the Council
and the more prudent—even hesitant—attitude of the Commission (vis-
ible in the withdrawal of the revision of the maternity directive proposal,
and the blockage of the women on corporate boards directive proposal).
The Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee of the European
Parliament (FEMM Committee) has always been considered as one of the
essential elements in the “velvet triangle” of European gender equality
policy (Ahrens 2016). As such it is subject to the same difficulties as the
other points of the triangle—in particularly the fact of being “velvet”, and
38 S. JACQUOT
thus fragile and regularly challenged. However, since the beginning of the
crisis, the European Parliament overall appears to be the most important
institution driving the development of action in favour of gender equal-
ity. Nevertheless, the FEMM Committee remained one of the smallest
and less legitimate committees. It was also a committee that had to fight
for its opinions to be taken up in plenary sessions.9 The changes to the
internal rules of procedure in the European Parliament contributed to the
feeling of a challenge to the political style and functioning of the FEMM
Committee. The successive reforms to the internal regulations of the
Parliament aimed to streamline the plenary session and thus strengthen
the hierarchy between the reports, so that since 2012 only those deemed
“strategic” could be presented and voted on in plenary session—own-
initiative reports being among the least “strategic”. Yet the FEMM
Commission has always stood apart on its intensive use of own-initiative
reports in order to promote public debate on questions of gender equality
in a range of areas.10 Overall, the FEMM Committee continues to consti-
tute a protected, but increasingly isolated, institutional space. Moreover,
recent analysis by Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín (2016) underlines the
importance of party group competition that can have an impact on the
European Parliament and the FEMM Committee positions according to
specific issues and/or across the policy process.
The civil society actors (particularly women’s and feminist organisa-
tions) as well as social partners (in particular women’s committees) have
played a central role in the emergence of European gender equality policy
since the very beginning and have accompanied its development over the
years. The evolutions of this policy since the second half of the 2000s have
led to transformations within the system of representation of interests in
the gender equality sector. These organisations are indeed confronted
with a political and economic context that is less and less hospitable and a
political space that is more and more restricted.
The development of a broad policy of rights that includes gender
equality, the fight against discrimination and the promotion of fundamen-
tal rights leads to a thematic competition linked to the recognition of
the demands made by organisations working in each of these different
areas. This is shadowed by the financial competition linked to obtaining
European funding and subsidies, which is intensified in periods of bud-
getary crisis. Moreover, the establishment of European social dialogue,
as well as a dense system of interactions between European institutions
and civil society organisations is historically linked to the development
A POLICY IN CRISIS. THE DISMANTLING OF THE EU GENDER EQUALITY POLICY 39
of the social aspect of the EU and its institutions (DG Employment and
Social Affairs, EPSCO Council). The stretching of these close preferential
ties due to the reaffiliation of the equality portfolio to questions of jus-
tice and fundamental rights necessarily contributed to the upheaval of the
landscape of interests in this area. As a result the actors were obliged to
redefine their place and their role within this system in crisis.
As far as the European Women’s Lobby (EWL) is concerned, in 2011,
83 % of its budget came from subsidies awarded as part of the PROGRESS
programme.11 More generally, if subsidies to women’s organisations rep-
resented 12 % of the total subsidies paid within the PROGRESS pro-
gramme in 2007, in the following years they only accounted for 6 % on
average.12 As a result, competition is rife between organisations in the
areas of gender equality, anti-discrimination and social inclusion and pro-
tection. Relational analyses confirm that within this increasingly encum-
bered field, in which political space is rarefied and funding opportunities
are reduced, the position of the EWL is median; it is not marginal but it is
no longer at the heart of the game (Johansson and Lee 2013). The stakes
then lie in adapting to an environment that is increasingly complex and
difficult. How can it maintain its legitimacy and continue to be convinc-
ing in its demands and interpretations of public problems affecting gender
equality? Examining the different solutions explored by the EWL in order
to take into account this new environment, Pauline Cullen believes that
“as such, the organisation faces a crisis of capacity and perhaps purpose
where they are increasingly reduced to the role of feminist watchdog for
the insertion of the term ‘gender’ into EU discourse” (Cullen 2014). The
influence of feminist mobilisations is clearly limited in this period of crisis,
in a sector that is increasingly fragmented and no longer able to create its
own opportunities.
If women’s and feminist organisations have always sought the expansion
of the perimeter of European gender equality policy and its extension out-
side of the social domain, social partners have by definition been attached
to the social aspect of gender equality. The evolution of the centre of grav-
ity of this policy and the formal distancing from the DG Employment,
are thus potentially more destabilising for social dialogue than for civil
dialogue in this area. This impact operates in both directions: less con-
sideration for the social dimension in gender equality policy, but also less
integration of issues linked to gender equality in the EU’s social actions.
These general tendencies are reflected by the social partners, against the
backdrop of the austerity policies. Symbolically, the Framework for Action
40 S. JACQUOT
on Gender Equality that was jointly signed by the social partners in 2005
after two years of negotiations was not renewed nor followed by any other
shared action after 2009.
shrink, stretch and bend its meaning in different areas. This gives rise to a
multitude of different manifestations of the equality principle.
This fragmentation of the shared conception of gender equality is clearly
a consequence of the increase in the number of member states within the
EU and the multiplication of national gender regimes (Walby 2004), of
which the increasing diversity weighs heavily on the specific gender regime
of the EU. The role of the institutional positioning also has a significant
impact on the way these problems are constructed and the solutions are
elaborated to deal with them. As a result, the shift from DG Employment
to DG Justice had a significant impact on the framing of this policy, which
went from being an all-encompassing social approach to a more abstract
approach based on rights. Moreover, the extension of the perimeter of
gender equality policy beyond its initial base and the opening up of new
problems and new sectors of public action (violence, trafficking, develop-
ment, environment etc.) have contributed to not only a fragmentation of
instruments and actors but also a fragmentation of dominant ideas and
representations.
Finally, the development of the anti-discrimination policy since the
beginning of the 2000s also represents a cognitive challenge that implies
reasoning in terms of intersectionality. Taking multiple discriminations
into account is still much more a discourse than a legal or institutional
reality at the European level (Lombardo and Verloo 2009; Krizsan et al.
2012). Yet its emergence leads the actors concerned to have to recon-
ceptualise the construction of the principle of equality and the place of
gender within it—a process that is still very much underway. Recently, the
cognitive framework of European gender equality policy, confronted with
an increasing diversity of meanings and the difficulty in agreeing on objec-
tives and strategies for action, became more shifting, more unstable and
consequently more vulnerable.
Beyond the internal transformations and the fragmentation of the
principle of equality, the context of economic and budgetary crisis also
contributes to destabilising the cognitive framework of European gender
equality policy. The fact that these are not “good times” for the EU gener-
ally has led to the reorganisation of public priorities and therefore the EU’s
agenda. As had started to be the case in the 2000s, the norm of gender
equality no longer had enough legitimacy in itself, it became subordinate
to other objectives higher up in the list of political priorities, particularly
economic ones. However, this configuration of “equality for the market”
has recently been accentuated and it seems that, even when subordinate to
42 S. JACQUOT
be considered a very restricted (or even restrictive) way of dealing with the
problem of women in decision-making. Making this proposal a priority in
terms of gender equality in this area means neglecting the bigger question
of the under-representation of women in positions of power, and focusing
on economic decision-making. This mechanism of reduction and refocus-
ing of priorities represents the only way of (trying to) develop gender
equality policy in a time of crisis.
Conclusion
If the cognitive frame of European gender equality policy has been charac-
terised by the reduction of the issues and the refocusing on certain aspects
of gender inequalities, this reflects a more general change that has been
occurring in this policy since a decade. The different mechanisms that
successively allowed its emergence, institutionalisation and normalisation
have broken down and no longer function. The cohesion of the “velvet
triangle”, the mobilisation of an avant-garde using the Court of Justice
as a relay of sovereignty, the development of non-binding instruments in
order to enlarge the EU’s area of expertise, the establishment of expert
groups with links to civil society in order to constitute a support base for
the policy, the elaboration of binding norms often more protective than
in most member states, the funding of positive action programmes allow-
ing this equality in law to be translated into facts: all of these activities and
strategies are—to varying extents—thrown into question.
Although the breakdown in these mechanisms appeared gradually, the
change that has resulted is no less profound. It effectively led to the “dis-
mantling by default” (Bauer et al. 2012) of European gender equality
policy. This dismantling is not a total destruction or a disappearance of
the policy. But it is nonetheless a significant reduction both in the density
(fewer actions and instruments) and intensity (smaller and lower level of
the perimeter of instruments and administrative and procedural abilities,
and of the possibilities for political coercion) of European public action in
the fight against gender inequalities (Bauer and Knill 2012). The direc-
tion taken by the recent modifications of the EU gender equality policy is
that of progressive extinction. Change is made without positive decision;
it has little visibility but all areas of policy are concerned (instruments,
institutional structures, public policy community, representations) and its
formal and substantial capacities are in dramatic decline. This dismantling
is not due to a deliberate decision or a political strategy aiming explicitly
44 S. JACQUOT
Notes
1. Interview with a member of the High Level Group on Gender
Mainstreaming, April 2013.
2. EQUAL is a European Social Fund programme destined for com-
bating inequalities in the labour market, with a part dedicated to
equal opportunities between women and men. In the 2000s it rep-
resented on average 75 % of all funding in favour of gender
equality.
3. This new programme also includes the Fundamental Rights and
Citizenship Programme and the section “Antidiscrimination and
Diversity” and “Gender Equality” of the PROGRESS Programme.
4. Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on the
“Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the
Council establishing for the period 2014 to 2020 the Rights and
Citizenship Programme” COM(2011) 758 final—2011/0344
(COD), 9 February 2012, rapporteur: Seamus Boland, OJ EU C
191/108 of 29 June 2012.
5. European Parliament, Report on the Daphne programme: achieve-
ments and future prospects (2011/2273(INI)), Committee for
Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, rapporteur: Regina Bastos.
6. Communication from the Commission, Europe 2020: A strategy
for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, COM (2010) 2020
final, 3 March 2010.
A POLICY IN CRISIS. THE DISMANTLING OF THE EU GENDER EQUALITY POLICY 45
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CHAPTER 3
Rosalind Cavaghan
Introduction
This chapter addresses the political dimensions of the financial crisis in
two respects. Firstly, it places contestations around competing ‘gender
knowledges’ embedded in ‘mainstream’ policy centre stage and articu-
lates an analytical approach, Gender Knowledge Contestation Analysis
which makes these contestations, and their significance, visible. Secondly,
it uses this approach to apply insights of Feminist Political Economy in
an examination of shifts in EU economic policy before and after the
2008 crisis.
This analysis points out how the EU’s increasing emphasis on macro-
economic aims presents new barriers to the identification and contesta-
tion of gender inequalities produced by EU strategic economic policy.
The chapter contributes to gender analysis of the crisis by developing an
R. Cavaghan (*)
Department of Political Science, Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for
Management Studies, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
has been patchy, its adoption has supplied rhetorical leverage for gender
equality activists in all of the EU’s policy areas, legitimating their engage-
ment with the gendered impacts of policies in all areas and helping to
support the development of gender expertise in many fields (see Cavaghan
2015; Pruegl 2012), particularly in employment (Hubert 2012; Villa and
Smith 2014a).
Since the onset of the financial crisis, however, gender equality advo-
cates have noted a sharp deterioration in the EU’s commitment to gen-
der equality and gender mainstreaming (European Women’s Lobby
2012a; European Women’s Lobby 2012b; European Women’s Lobby
2014; Klatzer and Schlager 2011: 64) noting that the EU’s major pol-
icy responses to the crisis, ‘austerity’, have been marked by a failure to
mainstream gender and on occasions to even mention women or gender
(Bettio et al. 2012; Leschke and Jepsen 2014: 13; O’Connor 2014: 73).
The negative impacts of austerity on women’s economic well-being have
however been well documented (European Women’s Lobby 2015; Harcourt
and Woestman 2010; Karamessini and Rubery 2014; Maier 2011), some-
thing gender equality advocates within the EU’s institutions, including
the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) in the
European Parliament (European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights
and Gender Equality (FEMM) 2013a; European Parliament Committee on
Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) 2013b) and some mem-
ber states (European Women’s Lobby 2014: 1) have sought to highlight.
Nonetheless, EU ‘austerity’ policies have continued not to acknowledge, anal-
yse or rectify these gendered impacts (European Parliament Committee on
Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) 2013b; Karamessini 2014:
333). Thus, where parts of the EU’s institutions had previously built knowl-
edge and expertise concerning the gendered aspects of many areas of public
policy, we seem to be witnessing a reversion to an un-apologetically gender-
blind EU strategic policy agenda, since the financial crisis. This has prompted
some feminist commentators to describe a ‘crisis’ or ‘U-turn’ in EU gender
equality policy (Jacquot 2015: 137; Karamessini and Rubery 2014: 333).
This chapter aims to deepen our understanding of how this ‘U-turn’
has come about, by building on perspectives that have argued for a focus
on the contestation of gendered meanings and assumptions embedded in
mainstream policy (Benschop and Verloo 2006) and bringing this to bear
on EU economic policies. To fulfil this aim, this chapter outlines a new
analytical approach Gender Knowledge Contestation Analysis, applying
it in conjunction with insights from Feminist Political Economy (Bakker
52 R. CAVAGHAN
meso or macro levels, because individuals (the key driver of the economy)
are per definition absent from these levels of analysis.
Critical economic approaches on the other hand such as Keynesian or
Marxist perspectives, which compete with neo-classical theories, contest
whether the macro economy is merely the aggregate product of individu-
als’ activities, arguing instead that the macro-economic level might have
dynamics of its own (Hoskyns 2008: 109) which may require intervention
and management. These approaches also take greater account of inequali-
ties between economic agents and norms shaping their behaviour (Elson
1994) and are therefore more readily open to analysis of actors as socially
gendered beings (e.g. Sen in Elson 1994).
However, Elson argues that even critical economists have great trouble
understanding gender except at the micro level where individuals are pres-
ent. Analysis undertaken at the macro level usually focuses on level of
demand and supply in markets, the interrelation between them and the
behaviour of firms, not with a view to understanding social outcomes,
but with a view to understanding the determinants of long-run economic
growth (Maier 2011: 11). Thus even within these ‘critical’ economic
approaches questions of individual welfare and income distribution are
usually relegated to ‘micro’-level analysis.
Feminist economic approaches by contrast, critique these assumed
divisions, arguing that individuals and their choices are regulated and
constructed by the state, at all levels of the economy emphasising that
gendered norms and outcomes operate across the board (Waylen 2006:
147). Empirical analyses seeking to underpin these arguments have, for
example, documented how changes in macro-economic policy, such as
reductions in state health, social or childcare and welfare spending have
gendered impacts (Elson 1994, 35–38; Grown, Elson and Catagay 2000;
Maier 2011; Elson 2002; Perrons 2005). These perspectives challenge
micro/meso/macro divisions, which so often structure mainstream eco-
nomic analysis and policy.
Feminist scholars have critiqued a further entrenched distinction in
mainstream economics—that between the ‘productive economy’, com-
prising monetised interactions such as wage labour or trade, and the
‘reproductive economy’, comprising the care which sustains individuals
and communities (Rai 2013). Feminists have stressed that mainstream
economic models ignore the interdependence between these two parts
of the economy, devaluing the reproductive sector as a site of production
(Elson 2002: 3) and implicitly assuming that it can function infinitely,
58 R. CAVAGHAN
no matter what pressures are placed upon it (Grown et al. 2000: 1148).
Feminist critiques have thus argued that social reproduction constitutes a
‘largely unrecognised subsidy to the economy as a whole’ (Hoskyns 2004:
4; Rai 2013; see also Rai et al. 2014). Within this literature this false divi-
sion between the productive and reproductive sphere and the defence of
corporate non-responsibility for social reproduction, is identified as fun-
damental organising principle for modern capitalist economies, which can
only be maintained by ignoring women’s lived economic experience as
both producers and reproducers (Acker 2004: 24).
The next section explores the shifting role played by these entrenched
economic disciplinary assumptions in EU responses to the financial crisis,
showing how the micro/macro-disciplinary split institutionalised within
EU policy-making processes, has taken on renewed significance for gender
equality activists in the wake of the financial crisis.
the effectiveness of new policies designed to target one or the other (Villa
and Smith 2014a: 274).
Between 1997 and 2005 we can thus observe an awareness of inter-
connections between different sectors of the economy within the Lisbon
Strategy and a gender knowledge, which explicitly recognises women’s
productive economic activity, and their reproductive activity, and the links
between the two. The role of (public) services, such as childcare, was rec-
ognised as a factor mediating women’s workforce participation.
The kind of objections that were raised … were just a laughing matter. They …
they thought they would come in and teach us. They were so ignorant; they had
no idea about our perspective of gender equality—even the most obvious things.
(Gender expert/activist A)
It was clear by the end of the meeting that there would have been no dialogue—
[DG Eco Fin was] very resistant. (Gender expert/activist A)
Conclusions
Applying a Gender Knowledge Contestation Analysis to examine what
methods of thinking dominate in the EU’s economic policy and how this
shapes or restricts understandings of gender, thus supplies a useful perspec-
tive on processes through which the gendered impacts of EU economic
policy responses to the crisis, have been insulated from contestation. This
chapter has presented an argument that common theoretical premises
entrenched in mainstream economics as a discipline, which discourage
analysis of interrelations of different sectors and levels in the economy, are
replicated and institutionalised in the EU’s economic policies, with clear
political effects.
‘Macro’-economic approaches to economic analysis appear predict-
ably incompatible with structural conceptions of gender inequality.
Employment policy on the other hand, which is premised on common
understandings of ‘micro’-economic issues, did during 1997–2005 prove
more receptive to analysis of linkages between productive and reproduc-
tive sectors of the economy, in turn enabling a more realistic concep-
tualisation of women’s lives and factors governing women’s workforce
participation.
THE GENDER POLITICS OF EU ECONOMIC POLICY: POLICY SHIFTS... 65
Notes
1. All of these respondents specifically asked that their location within
the Commission not be revealed, one respondent had recently left at
the time of interview.
2. It should be emphasised therefore that gender knowledge is emphat-
ically not to be confused with expertise about gender or gender
inequality and that the use of the term ‘knowledge’ does not imply
any kind of legitimation or approval of any given statement. Because
gender is an omni-present and often implicit organising factor in
social and political life, gender knowledge often takes the form of
implicit assumptions embedded in wider working practices. Use of
Gender Knowledge Contestation Analysis is intended to help
uncover these kinds of ideas and in this instance to reveal and chal-
lenge the collective processes insulating them from contestation.
3. See http://ec.europea.eu/europa2020 for an accessible summary.
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Elaine Weiner and Heather MacRae
Introduction
The responses to the recession at the European and national level … repre-
sent an opportunity and transformational moment to modernize the labor
market and promote gender equality—Analysis Note: Gender Equality and
Recession, financed and prepared for the Directorate-General Employment,
Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities (Smith 2009: 2).
Funding for this research was provided, in part, by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Grants Program). The views
expressed in this chapter are those of the authors.
E. Weiner (*)
Department of Sociology, McGill University,
855 Sherbrooke Street West, 712 Leacock Building, Montreal, QC, Canada,
H3A 2T7
H. MacRae
Department of Political Science, York University,
S672 Ross Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3
When the credit crunch triggered in 2008 in the United States evolved
into a full-scale economic and financial crisis, the recessionary effects
rippled across the globe. No economy escaped unscathed, but the eco-
nomic bust hit advanced industrialized economies, such as the European
Union (EU), harder than those emerging and developing (Karamessini
2013). The Eurozone crisis (also referred to as the European debt cri-
sis and the European sovereign debt crisis) gave rise to a profusion of
responses ranging from stimulus packages and bailouts to the imposi-
tion of austerity measures and increased scrutiny of national spending
plans. Though the market disturbances to EU member states varied,
their Common Market integration necessitated substantial supranational
policy redress in order to mitigate the financial contagion of the crisis
(Dornbusch et al. 2000). The European Commission, the EU’s execu-
tive arm, declared the importance of rapid and coordinated action early
on: “Quick and decisive action is needed to stop this downward spiral.
Europe must use all the tools at its disposal” (European Commission
2008: 4).
Notably, among “all the tools” available to policymakers to counter the
crisis in the EU was gender mainstreaming. Formally introduced in 1996,
gender mainstreaming involves bringing a “gender equality perspective”
to bear “in all [EU] policies, at all levels and at all stages” (Council of
Europe 1998: 5). Such an initiative led some to praise the EU as one of
“the most progressive polities” in the world (Pollack and Hafner-Burton
2000: 452). Gender mainstreaming augmented the EU’s existing efforts
to advance gender equality via directives on equal treatment and positive
action measures, instigated in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Together,
they constitute a project to progress gender equality that reaches back sev-
eral decades. Though this project has made some inroads, the path of its
policy competencies has generally steered clear of policy realms most cen-
tral to exacting the four freedoms (i.e., unrestrained mobility of capital,
goods, services and people) which collectively represent the touchstone
and often-espoused raison d’etre of European integration (MacRae 2010:
161; see also MacRae 2013). Many feminist scholars and activists thus
point to these neoliberal foundational underpinnings as a major, if not the
main, impediment to the EU’s gender equality project (e.g., see Hoskyns
1996; MacRae 2010).
Though multiple interpretations as to the (true) cause of the EU’s
economic and financial crisis abound, many feminist scholars and activ-
ists shared in the indictment of its neoliberal capitalist logics as deeply,
OPPORTUNITY AND SETBACK? GENDER EQUALITY, CRISIS AND CHANGE... 75
more limited application (i.e., solely to equal work). The article declared:
“Each Member State shall during the first stage ensure and subsequently
maintain the application of the principle that men and women should
receive equal pay for equal work.” By intent, Article 119 was designed to
deter unfair competition in the Common Market, with some states using
women to lower wages (Hoskyns 1996). Looking back, there are virtually
no indications that the Treaty framers—notably, all men—were guided by
any principles other than economic gain and fair competition. As Hoskyns
(1996: 57) affirmed, “[a]t no time are the interests of women considered
even obliquely or the issues of social justice raised.” Effectively, and per-
haps not so surprisingly, any concern for gender equality was absent in the
creation of the Common Market.
Nonetheless, the socially turbulent 1960s coupled with a growing
angst over increasing monetary instability, provoked calls for action in the
European Community to respond to what John Rey, then President of the
European Commission declared a “‘profound economic and social crisis’”
(Hoskyns 1996: 79). Among the emphases of response, was a “closer link
between the economic and social” (Hoskyns 1996: 81). This rapproche-
ment enabled the EU’s gender equality project to grow in the 1970s,
with the conception of equal treatment directives. These directives made
mandatory EU member states’ transposition of various anti-discrimination
laws. Notably, however, in their treatment of gender equality as same-
ness and the confinement of such remedies to the labor market, they
maintained (and promoted) the EU’s foundational priorities in their core
aim of encouraging women’s labor market participation (MacRae 2006;
Young 2000).
The opportunity that made possible the realization of several equal
treatment directives was short-lived, however, as the 1979 oil crisis set
off a global economic downturn. In the early 1980s, a “battle was fought
out within the European institutions” over the solution—that is, mar-
ket deregulation (regardless of the social costs) versus a “middle way”
that worked to mitigate the social effects (Hoskyns 1996: 140). In 1985,
the “deregulators” won out, with member states unanimously electing
to complete market liberalization (Hoskyns 1996: 140). In this “cold
climate” (Hoskyns 1996: 140) positive action measures such as women-
only training and family-friendly tactics including flexible working hours
were launched, thus “tailoring” women to fit into the Common Market
(Rees 1998). Unlike the equal treatment directives’ hard legal and judi-
cial modes of recourse, positive action measures were a soft corrective to
OPPORTUNITY AND SETBACK? GENDER EQUALITY, CRISIS AND CHANGE... 81
cope with the economic and financial crisis. Though some would point
to neoliberalism as the main culprit in the crisis, many defended its right-
ness. In the EU, economic restructuring meant a tightening, rather than a
loosening up of neoliberalism’s grip. There would be no major upending
in the gendered distribution of power or dramatic deviation in its guiding
economic logic. In nominal terms, men continue to hold the reins on the
EU’s economy. Substantively, they have sought to reaffirm and strengthen
a rationale—neoliberal in nature—in place since the EU came to be.
In late 2008, the European Commission set out the European Economic
Recovery Plan (EERP) as the first major, collective reaction to the crisis.
The EERP constituted an action plan that aimed to limit the effects of the
global economic slowdown on the then 27 EU member states (European
Commission 2008). This was accomplished principally through fiscal stim-
ulus measures and countercyclical macro-economic policies (e.g., increas-
ing loans, equity, guarantees). However, when these measures did not
appear to achieve their goals and instead, national budget deficits began to
grow out of control, the EU looked to new crisis-containment measures.
Severe irregularities in Greece’s budget, in particular, sparked further con-
cern and led policymakers to turn to budget cuts, spending reductions and
widespread austerity measures to reduce deficit and debt. A set of longer-
term structural reforms, aimed at mitigating the destabilizing effects of
any future crisis, were subsequently added, further augmenting and defin-
ing the EU’s policy response to the crisis.
Notably, the EERP contained “no mention” of gender, women or
equality (ENEGE and EGGSI 2013: 18). Even the “prerequisites” of
assessing the gender impacts of the plan which only entailed “present[ing]
gender-disaggregated statistics”—a preliminary step for gender main-
streaming—never occurred (Bettio 2012: 11). This early neglect pro-
voked some internal censure. For instance, the European Commission’s
Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, in
2009, pointed to little account for “gender … when formulating policy
responses” and emphasized the imperative “to incorporate a gender per-
spective into all policies and measures being planned or implemented to
alleviate the crisis” (2009: 5–6). This committee would further go on
to cite negatively the dominance of men and dearth of women holding
decision-making authority in Europe’s financial institutions (p. 9). Early
on, the European Women’s Lobby also cited the “denial” of gender in the
crisis problem and in its policy solutions and stressed the “urgency” for a
“gender perspective” in the “post-crisis” framework (2009). Despite these
84 E. WEINER AND H. MACRAE
immediate criticisms and calls for policymaking reform, the gender dimen-
sion remained a lacuna in much of the EU’s subsequent policy responses
to the crisis.
In 2010, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the
European Financial Stability Mechanism (EFSM) were established,
albeit only temporarily, to function principally as a lending instrument
to EU member states experiencing (or at risk of) financial difficulties
prompted by the crisis.6 The European Stability Mechanism (ESM), put
in place in 2012, represents their permanent successor.7 Some see these
bailout tactics as the beginnings of a “new architecture” for EU gover-
nance (Bauer and Becker 2014), though such recrafting is likely most
clearly reflected in the introduction of the European Semester, and the
substantial restructuring of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) via the
Six Pack and Two Pack and the related Fiscal Stability Treaty (European
Commission 2013a).
The European Semester was introduced in 2010 as a means of insur-
ing policy coordination among the member states (European Commission
2011a). Prior to the crisis, economic policy coordination in the EU
was largely elective. Member states annually submitted their National
Reform Programmes, laying out their economic plans for the coming
year. However, no collective review of these national efforts occurred.
In contrast, the European Semester now makes the reporting of mem-
ber states’ budgetary plans mandatory and promotes “collective” and
long-term strategizing toward harmonizing the EU economy (European
Commission 2013b: 4).
The SGP has undergone numerous reforms since its beginnings in
1997. In 2011, the so-called Six Pack and Two Pack were introduced
as a means of substantially fortifying the SGP. The five regulations and
single directive that comprise the Six Pack strengthen both the preventa-
tive and punitive elements of the SGP’s initial formulation in a twofold
fashion (European Commission 2011b). First, they strengthen the coor-
dination of fiscal policy and second, they scrutinize and correct macro-
economic imbalances in the euro area. Two further regulations (i.e., the
Two Pack) were subsequently added, targeting budgetary coordination in
the Eurozone in an effort to avoid negative spillover effects among states.
Despite the expressed concerns about the gender blindness of the
EERP and manifold recommendations to rectify it in subsequent crisis
policy responses, invocations to consider gender equality in policies such
as the European Semester and the various reforms of the SGP were largely
OPPORTUNITY AND SETBACK? GENDER EQUALITY, CRISIS AND CHANGE... 85
2015; Degryse et al. 2013).9 Though this may signal the “rise” of a more
“authoritarian” type of neoliberalism (Bruff and Wöhl 2016: 98; Wöhl
2014) portending new challenges for the EU’s gender equality project, we
might remember this is not the first clash with a neoliberal logic of action.
Conclusion
Taking a feminist historical institutionalist approach, we have sought,
in this chapter, to consider the confrontation between the EU’s gender
equality project and a (global) economic and financial crisis set off in 2008
which hit the EU economy hard. Though, for some, 2008 opened up
the prospect for major change—upending the long-standing, neoliberal
rules of the game—policymakers instead elected to reinscribe the standing
institutional order. This is, in many ways, business as usual intensified. EU
policy responses to the crisis reaffirmed and fortified its collective neolib-
eral rationale and the stronghold of male power. Indeed, they went hand
in hand, mutually reinforcing one another. Without some recalibrating of
the gendered power imbalance, particularly in substantive terms—and the
logics so endorsed—any remaking of the EU’s economic infrastructure
seems more wishful thinking than plausible path.
While the reentrenchment of neoliberalism and its masculine supports
borne out of the crisis is disheartening to those seeking a more gender-
equitable reality, we find more consistency than not in terms of the EU
gender equality project’s foothold in the EU’s broader economic integra-
tion efforts. Despite decades of trying to institutionally entrench gender
equality, it remains on the sidelines. When gender equality poses no threat
to European economic integration or when it becomes functional to the
Common Market’s growth and competitiveness, it gains some traction.
The EU’s gender equality project has traversed a path but its own free-
dom to move is, and has always been, restricted. In tracing out the macro
contours of the EU’s gender equality project, we show how its progress,
and lack thereof, has been—and continues to be—significantly enabled by
the EU’s economic (in)stability. Its trajectory, therefore, from the incep-
tion of Europe’s integration efforts, has been quite uneven, marked by fits
and starts. The project unquestionably has its successes but these changes
have been layered on to the rules of the game, without any big institu-
tional transformation to lock in gender equality as part of the EU’s guiding
logic ever having transpired.
OPPORTUNITY AND SETBACK? GENDER EQUALITY, CRISIS AND CHANGE... 87
Notes
1. See, for instance, the Treaty Establishing the European Community,
the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Treaty on the Functioning of the
European Union and the Treaty of Lisbon.
2. In historical institutionalism, actors are more often referred to as
interests.
88 E. WEINER AND H. MACRAE
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OPPORTUNITY AND SETBACK? GENDER EQUALITY, CRISIS AND CHANGE... 93
Roberta Guerrina
Introduction
Austerity has become the defining feature of EU politics over the last
ten years. The language of exceptionalism associated with the ‘the great
recession’ (Keeley and Love 2010) has proved to be fertile ground for
ideologically driven restructuring. Concerns about sovereign debt and
its impact of the stability of the Eurozone led to the establishment of
strict fiscal mechanisms aimed at ensuring member states’ compliance
and have led to the most systematic challenge to the European social
model to date.
The ensuing research agenda has focused primarily on sovereign debt
as a test for the political commitment of member states to the European
project. Inevitably, issues relating to economic governance and the future
of the European project have dominated the debate (e.g. Trichet 2010;
Vilpišauskas 2013; Dyson 2013; Menz and Smith 2013). The impact of
the current crisis on Europe’s foundational norms, for example, equality
between men and women, however, does not seem to have captured the
R. Guerrina (*)
Department of Politics, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK
analysis presented here will show that in the case of austerity and crisis,
feminist advocates were not able to influence the policy process and gen-
erate sufficient momentum for a counter-discourse on crisis outside of
narrow gender networks.
This ‘great recession’ poses a key question about whether the EU—or
selected institutions within the organisations—can maintain its role as a
gender actor and advocate for women’s (economic) rights during critical
junctures. The analysis presented in this section will draw on Woodward’s
idea of a velvet triangle to assess the efficacy of women’s rights advocacy
during the Eurocrisis. This will allow for an assessment of processes for
interest representation and institutional blindness to gender power struc-
tures in the context of crisis. Woodward’s work on enlargement provides
important insights into the processes that support effective women’s rights
advocacy at the European level.
In the context of EU politics, the complex interactions between differ-
ent stakeholders define the shape of key policies. This is why Woodward’s
velvet triangle and van der Vleuten pincer effect are necessary precon-
ditions for gendering to those areas traditionally viewed as gender neu-
tral or free. Van der Vleuten (2012: loc 1544) speculates that ‘gender
mainstreaming might actually increase the number of “privileged point
of access” to this complex system’. However, the evidence from the crisis
would indicate that mainstreaming has failed to increase women’s rights
activists access to the different loci of economic governance.
This section explores institutional reactions to the crisis as a locus for
‘multilateral feminist strategies’ (Caglar et al. 2013). It will focus on three
institutional actors that contribute to the establishment of a velvet triangle
for women’s rights advocacy: the European Parliament, the European
Commission’s network of experts and the EWL. The section will look at
each actor’s response to negotiations within the Council and mainstream/
malestream approaches to the Eurocrisis. This discussion will thus unpack
the emergence and effectiveness of counter-discourses in the context of
102 R. GUERRINA
crisis. In particular, it will provide a useful case study for the analysis of
international organisations as a locus of feminist advocacy. This analysis
provides important insights into the role of actors (i.e. EWL, femocrats
and expert groups) working within institutional frameworks, which ulti-
mately provide both opportunities and constraints for the enactment of
‘feminist strategies’ at the national and European levels (Caglar et al.
2013).
The chapter is based on the analysis of position papers, reports, official
opinions by the EWL, the FEMM Committee and the European Network
of Experts. The documents were selected for their focus on crisis and ana-
lysed to ascertain how women’s interest and concerns were represented
at the European level. Content analysis of the documents was carried out
to establish the emergence of a counter-narrative to the politics of auster-
ity and crisis. The documents were coded to establish the centrality of
women’s interests and a critique of European policies and member states
positions to the work of pillar of the triangle. Each actor or group was
chosen specifically to highlight how institutions and organised civil soci-
ety can come together to represent the interests of traditionally marginal
groups in European policy-making processes.
within the context of the European Equality Agenda, this resolution seeks
to draw attention to the gendered impact of the crisis. It considers a range
of issues from economic governance to unemployment, restructuring of
care services and migration. This resolution is important because it signals
increased awareness of the differential impact of the crisis on groups and
sectors of the economy.
The report tackles the issue of economic governance head on, looking
at the overall impact of women’s under-representation in economic and
financial decision-making bodies contributed to the onset of the crisis.
Paragraph C sets out the EP’s critique:
Whereas mainstream economists have pointed out that the credit crunch,
which started the recession, was quite literally a man-made disaster; whereas
responses at state and international level—which were not sufficiently
gender-inclusive—have also been decided upon mainly by men; whereas it
is important that women, who are generally better qualified than men, be
fully included in the decision-making process in the political, economic and
financial spheres as well as social partners agreements.
equal treatment of women and men is one of the objectives of the EU and
therefore one of the key principles in any policy response to the economic
and financial crisis and the transition towards the post-crisis era.
ment represents a stark warning that the settlement of the crisis is likely to
crystallise a normative agenda that is rooted in gender power hierarchies
(Paragraphs 19 and B). The EP Women’s Committee is thus concerned
that this critical juncture is failing in implementing legal commitments
to mainstreaming and thus becomes an opportunity missed to shape
European governance. Given the recognition in the document of the gen-
dered nature of the factors leading to the crisis (e.g. Paragraphs B and
40), current negotiations could provide an opportunity to renegotiate the
gender contract at the heart of European welfare states and social models
(Paragraphs 18 and 34). The Resolution warns, however, that the current
direction of travel is unlikely to challenge these values as much as threaten
the progress of the last 40 years towards gender equality (Paragraphs 28
and 29).
The message in the explanatory note framing the Resolution is aligned
with much of the feminist literature (e.g. Walby 2009) and although it
does not openly speak of mainstreaming, it advocates a gender dimension
to policy-making at the European and national level.
Both feminist and mainstream economists have pointed out that the credit
crunch is quite literally a man-made disaster. The crunch has emboldened
advocates of boardroom diversity, who insist that, as a matter of urgency, we
need to have more women at the top of financial institutions. Male failure
might open up opportunities for women to smash through the glass ceiling.
(EP 2010b: 11)
The discursive nodes that dominate this document are: activation; repre-
sentation, economic governance, equality. Tackling rising levels of female
unemployment and increase in poverty levels of ‘at risk groups’, particu-
larly in view of changing socio-economic circumstances of households sets
out a reform agenda: ‘Europe can no longer afford to neglect its female
human resources by treating women as a back-up plan to boost the work-
force only when economic conditions dictate the demand’ (EP 2010b:
14). These objectives map nicely into the main the core values of the
European Equality Agenda, which underpins the main narrative of the
document.
The second European Parliament Report On the Impact of the Economic
Crisis on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights published in 2012 builds
on the previous debate. The Report broadens the reach of equality nar-
ratives to show increasing recognition of structural factors underpinning
GENDERING EUROPEAN ECONOMIC NARRATIVES: ASSESSING THE COSTS... 105
that unemployed women are often not included in official figures because
they tend to withdraw from the labour market and to perform unpaid or
informal labour. (EP 2012 Paragraph C)
Once again the EP formally acknowledges the impact of public sector cuts
on women’s access to high-level employment (Paragraphs D and 8). What
is significant about this Report is the way it links women’s withdrawal
from the labour force with the retrenchment of the welfare state. It openly
identifies women as the main providers of unpaid care work, thus reliev-
ing the costs on the state for the provision of these services. It is for this
reason that it ‘calls on Member States to support job creation in the social
economy which is dominated by unpaid work by women’ (Paragraph 16).
It is in this context that it reiterates the importance of the Barcelona tar-
gets, particularly in relation to childcare.
The main point of departure from the 2010 Resolution is the focus
on gender budgeting. Calling for a gender impact assessment of austerity
measures, the report provides an important opening for detailed discus-
sions about mainstreaming in the context of crisis. It speaks to some of
the values that support institutional and policy myopia in relation to the
impact of the crisis on women: ‘More deep-rooted is the idea that male
unemployment is more serious than female unemployment’ (EP 2012: 9).
This impact assessment is linked to the explicit recognition that the crisis
and public sector cuts are likely to increase women’s double burden:
For women who remain in work, there is the question of reconciling work
with their private life. They have to combine their work with domestic tasks,
a major share of which falls to them, and also quite often with caring depen-
dents (children, parents, the sick or disabled). (EP 2012: 10)
(2012) extensive report covers a number of key areas starting from the
nature of the crisis through to paid and unpaid work, fiscal consolida-
tion and social exclusion. The study highlights something that has pre-
occupied feminist scholars for the last couple of decades, namely that
there is no homogeneous womanly experience. Crisis magnifies existing
trends, thus bringing to light that socio-economic status, culture, eth-
nicity interface in shaping women’s experiences of crisis and austerity.
The dominant view discussed earlier in this chapter that women’s labour
market participation is secondary and can be (more) easily absorbed by
households is based not only on gender ideologies about divisions of
labour and the social function of reproduction, it is also deeply rooted
in a middle-class ideal of the male-breadwinner model. Although domi-
nant, and responsible for shaping social policies towards work-life bal-
ance in post-war Europe, it is an ideal that many women from lower
socio-economic backgrounds have had to manage for decades, as they
are either the sole earners of the household or make a substantial contri-
bution to the household economy.
The report produces a number of key conclusions. The first one is per-
haps counter-intuitive as they found a ‘leveling down of gender gaps in
employment, unemployment, wage and poverty over the crisis’ (Bettio
et al. 2012: 11). This finding needs to be understood within the wider
context of the impact of the crisis on European employment rates. It is
indicative of increased poverty levels for both men and women in employ-
ment. Whereas gender segregation of the labour market—particularly the
low levels of women working in the financial industry—sheltered women
from the worst effects of the crisis, public sector adjustment, retrenchment
of the welfare state and austerity more generally have had a dispropor-
tional impact on women in the latter half of the crisis as costs associated
with women’s entry in the labour market—for example, childcare—have
started to increase (Bettio et al. 2012).
Their second conclusion concentrates on individual choices: ‘the labour
market behavior of women over the crisis has been similar to that of men’
(Bettio et al. 2012: 12). The data produced by the Commission again
highlights a very complex picture where diversity in women’s experiences
needs to be unpacked to produce a detailed analysis of the drivers and
norms underpinning the crisis and the policies that are supposed to resolve
or ameliorate it. From this perspective, women’s rights and equality are
not necessarily the target of a regressive policy agenda, but are likely to
become collateral damage. As Bettio et al. (2012: 12) explain:
108 R. GUERRINA
There are repercussions from the crisis that specifically concern women. The
rights of pregnant women to maternity leave and benefits have been cur-
tailed and discrimination against pregnant women has been documented in
at least four countries.
Gender ideologies for instance are likely to play a key role in shaping
decisions about hiring women, particularly in relation to concerns about
employers’ responsibilities and legal commitments.
The network of experts’ reports is both insightful and important as it
substantiates the feminist claims about the impact of austerity on the pres-
ent and future of the European Equality Agenda. It highlights the failure
of the member states to implement the legal commitments to mainstream-
ing thus undermining the work of European institutions when it comes
to transposing policies at the national level. Finally, this represents the
academic advocacy of Woodward’s velvet triangle.
Draft a new long-term vision for the future and replaced EU-level policies
aiming to achieve short-term fiscal stability with policies that will provide
equality and solidarity driven prosperity in the long term and safeguard the
economic positions of both women and men. (EWL 2012: 16)
The overall aim of the arguments presented in these documents is that the
current model not only fails women, but also society at large.
The analysis presented here highlights the continued importance of
civil society organisations in ensuring that gender is not dismissed in
favour of higher political priorities. It is therefore worrying that ‘Public
gender equality institutions are being destroyed on the pretext of austerity.
The erosion of the public gender equality machinery is an infringement
of EU ad international level commitments to women’s rights and gender
equality’ (EWL 2012: 14). The loss of expertise on gender equality at the
national and European level will ultimately undermine the ability of gen-
der actors to operate within an institutional framework, thus weakening
the advocacy and accountability mechanisms currently available.
Conclusions
The main conclusion of this analysis is that, despite a concerted effort by
the EWL and the FEMM committee to raise awareness about the asym-
metrical impact of austerity on women, mechanisms to support women’s
rights advocacy have not been successful in engendering effectively the
policy process. Dominant gender ideologies about men and women’s
role in the economy—and the family—supported path dependency in
intergovernmental negotiations thus skewing debates in favour of gender
blind measures. Taking stock of how the low levels of women’s represen-
tation in economic governance are linked to performance of hegemonic
masculinity on the Single Market must be the starting point of a femi-
nist account of the Eurocrisis. Understanding the interface between the
deeply masculine nature of neo-liberalism and the economic structures
in which we operate can provide solutions that are more sustainable than
austerity.
In terms of the future of the equality acquis, it is disappointing that the
European Parliament, the Commission and the EWL have not been effec-
tive in inserting gender at the heart of the current negotiations. Rather the
Eurocrisis has crystallised the distinction between high and low politics,
whereby equality and social cohesion are seen as the concern of institu-
tions only at time of affluence. Recognition of the importance of gen-
der budgeting can start to unpick these assumptions, but the road ahead
remains difficult as the normative nature of these discussions—that is, the
power of gender ideologies—continues to define political priorities. As
Rubery (2014) points out,
112 R. GUERRINA
The problem relates to the strategic approach endorsed by the three actors
covered in this article. During the 1990s, the EP, the Commission and the
EWL, adopted a strategic position that focused on raising awareness of the
cost of non-equality. Although this was a successful strategy to encourage
member states and social partners to invest in equality measures, it also
projected a view that policies for the reconciliation between work and fam-
ily life were directly aimed at women. This approach ultimately buys into a
neo-liberal discourse based on the commodification of care that mitigates
gender structures and divisions of labour, but it does not challenge them
at their very core. It is also a strategy that is no longer viable at a time of
austerity.
To conclude, Woodward’s velvet triangle is present in the context of the
Eurocrisis, but its key actors seem to have only limited purchase on policy-
making processes. Part of the reason for this relates to Walby’s assessment
of European economic governance. Women’s absence from the negotiat-
ing table, and the inability of European institutions to demonstrate leader-
ship at a time of crisis, is ultimately undermining the scope and reach of
the European equality agenda. Like in the case of Enlargement, the failure
to mainstream gender adequately at this critical junction will have long-
term repercussions for the ability of the EU and its institutions to operate
as a gender actor. Part of the problem is that much of the work produced
by feminist scholars seeking to gender austerity remains ghettoised. This
marginalisation reflects the struggle of feminist activists at the national and
European level to raise awareness about the asymmetrical impact of the
crisis on women.
Bibliography
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GENDERING EUROPEAN ECONOMIC NARRATIVES: ASSESSING THE COSTS... 113
Ania Zbyszewska
Introduction
The initial optimism that the 2007/2008 financial crisis could mark a
turning point in the neoliberal policy direction adopted by the European
Union (EU) was by 2010 replaced with a growing concern that, instead,
the broader economic crisis that ensued might be used to weaken the
‘European Social Model’ and undermine national systems of labour law
and social protection. The widespread deregulation of labour laws and the
adoption of austerity measures in many EU member states—prompted
by the memorandums of understanding signed between the ‘troika’ (the
European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International
Monetary Fund) and the Eurozone countries requiring bail-outs, as well
as the broader focus on budgetary discipline imposed by the EU’s 2011
‘six pack’ reforms1—largely confirmed these fears (see Introduction and
Weiner and MacRae’s chapters in this volume; Barnard 2012; Clauwaert
and Schömann 2012; Moreau 2011). As the reforms were unrolled
throughout Europe, feminists were among the first to scrutinize their
potential impact on women and men (Klatzer and Schlager 2014; Rubery
2013; Karamessini and Rubery 2013; Bieling 2012; Leschke and Jepsen
A. Zbyszewska (*)
University of Warwick School of Law, Gibbet Hill Rd, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK
2012; Annesley and Scheele 2011; Walby 2009) albeit focusing primarily
on the situation in EU countries most negatively affected by the crisis, and
thus, bearing the brunt of reforms. Somewhat less attention has been paid
to the situation in EU member states where the crisis was deemed less
severe, both in terms of the reforms adopted therein and their gendered
impacts (see Czerniawska et al. 2010; Łapniewska 2010).
This chapter contributes to the feminist scholarship on gendering the EU
crisis response by focusing on the case of Poland, a Central Eastern European
(CEE) EU member state that is not yet part of the Eurozone and was the
sole European country to register growth after the crisis began.2 Given this
unique status, Poland might not be the obvious case for examining whether
and how the EU macroeconomic governance and policy shaped the national
reforms, and with what gender consequences. Yet, the hegemonic neolib-
eralism that defined how the Eurozone members responded also framed
the crisis response there. Moreover, as this chapter illustrates, the Polish
response similarly lacked effective gender mainstreaming and was inatten-
tive to gender impacts that it might produce. As I show, however, rather
than being a clear case of policy convergence due to supranational (EU)
influence, a more complex interaction between the EU and national policy
agendas was at play. A contextual analysis of the reforms Poland adopted
reveals that while Europeanization played a role, the country’s response was
consistent with long-standing domestic restructuring trajectory embedded
within the post-1989 political-economic transition, and with the past prac-
tice of using crises to legitimate unpopular reforms. In effect, the Polish
response agenda converged with EU policy dictates in so far as the latter
resonated with local political preferences. With regard to gender policy, this
translated into inadequate mainstreaming of gender equality concerns in the
adopted anti-crisis measures. To the extent that gender and gender equal-
ity were considered, they were subordinate and largely filtered through the
neoliberal policy frame.
The chapter analyses the legislative reforms adopted in Poland between
2009 and 2014 intended to pre-empt or address the effects of the post-
2008 economic crisis. These include special bills amending the Labour
Code, an amendment to the laws governing the labour market institutions,
an amendment to the pension legislation, as well as a series of legisla-
tive measures designed to balance the national budget. The reforms are
interpreted against the EU response, as well as against the policy trajectory
of Poland’s post-1989 structural adjustment and Poland’s future develop-
ment plans as articulated by 2009 and 2012 strategic policy documents. In
GENDERING POLAND’S CRISIS REFORMS: A EUROPEANIZATION PERSPECTIVE 119
Poland’s first response to the crisis came in the form of the 2009 Anti-
Crisis Bill,4 a package of pre-emptive reforms the Civic Platform govern-
ment negotiated with the social partner organizations (representatives
of labour and employers) and designed to counteract the potentially
negative impact of the economic slowdown on Polish firms. The bill’s
core elements were measures relaxing the Labour Code provisions on
fixed-term work and working time. Specifically, the bill lifted the existing
two-time limit on a number of consecutive fixed-term contracts and dis-
pensed with the rule converting the third such contract into permanent
employment. It also created opportunities for longer and cheaper (for
employers) work hours, by permitting extensions of reference periods
for the calculation of average weekly work hours (and overtime) from
the usual limit of 4 months to up to 12 months; a possibility previously
restricted to a few industrial sectors. Polish employers welcomed this
long sought-after change5 while the unions sanctioned it on the basis
that it would be temporary, to expire by the end of 2011, and because its
introduction in specific workplaces required consultation with workers.
The trade unions also agreed to this provision as a trade-off for intro-
GENDERING POLAND’S CRISIS REFORMS: A EUROPEANIZATION PERSPECTIVE 123
abolish the special scheme that entitles farmers to lower-cost social and
health insurance (KRUS), and to facilitate commercialization and liberal-
ization of health and education services. Already in 2011, the Act on care
of children under 3 liberalized the rules for private care institutions and
made it easier for municipal governments to outsource publically funded
early-childhood education services to private operators (Skóra 2013).7
Also to consolidate spending, in May 2012 the Civic-Platform dominated
Parliament passed a highly unpopular bill raising to 67, and equalizing,
the age of retirement for men (from 65 by 2020) and women (from 60
by 2040), and reducing early retirement privileges for uniformed workers
(Rae 2012).
The reforms adopted in Poland between 2009 and 2014 were similar to
those undertaken by many other EU members. However, given Poland’s
comparatively good economic performance at the outset of the crisis,
Civic Platform’s decision to adopt austerity and unpopular labour law and
pension reforms at the risk of alienating labour unions and in the face of
significant public disapproval (Aksamit et al. 2013) raises questions about
the political motivations underlying these reforms. On the one hand,
budget cuts were indeed necessary to comply with the Fiscal Pact and
binding obligations under the bilateral agreement Poland signed with the
European Commission. In light of Poland’s non-Eurozone status, how-
ever, both commitments were in fact voluntarily adopted. While more
or less explicit EU pressure given Poland’s EMU candidacy may be one
explanation of this voluntarism, assessing the crisis response against the
backdrop of Poland’s longer-term policy choices suggests a more complex
dynamic.
Neoliberal policy blueprints, not unlike those imposed on Eurozone
countries requiring bailouts, have been guiding Poland’s transition to a
free market economy since the early 1990s. It is worth noting that the
country’s adoption of the harshest plan of structural adjustment (‘shock
therapy’) in 1991 was also voluntary, even if it was at the time presented
as the only alternative (Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2009; Shields 2008).
Importantly, despite retrospective criticisms surrounding that choice,
neoliberal economic and fiscal guidelines, in fact, remained a generally
accepted status quo by most post-transition governments (Grzymalala-
Busse and Innes 2003; Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2009; Ost 2005;
GENDERING POLAND’S CRISIS REFORMS: A EUROPEANIZATION PERSPECTIVE 125
work hours, even if temporarily, without the need for overtime compensa-
tion, although with approval of employee representatives. A scheduling
mechanism of this type is not family-friendly, yet this, or its other possible
gender implications (such as the fact that it might reinforce gendered divi-
sions within the workplace and the home since women are less likely to
be available for extended work hours while take-up of such hours by men
would render them unlikely to shoulder a higher share of domestic or care
work) were set aside. The priority of introducing a business-efficiency,
cost-cutting measure trumped gender considerations. That the family-
friendly and gender-neutrally framed possibility to reduce hours of work
was a poor trade-off, because it would not necessarily offset how long
hours of work reproduce gendered patterns of work and care, suggests a
rather partial, instrumental approach to gender mainstreaming.
Another effort at gender mainstreaming in the context of anti-crisis
measures was the aforementioned pension reform, which was also designed
to consolidate public funds. This is another example of gendering an area
related to employment activation, which is a perennial policy objective
nationally and at the EU level. The key gender components of this par-
ticular reform were the provisions phasing in an increase and equalization
of the retirement and pension eligibility age to 67 years, up from 65 and
60 years for men and women respectively. The reform was in part justified
on equal treatment grounds, and legitimated as necessary to address the
fact that women’s shorter and more interrupted work histories (particu-
larly vis-à-vis women’s longer life spans) regularly leave women with inad-
equate pensions and contribute to old age poverty. While this is indeed the
case, application of equal treatment and non-discrimination law does not
always yield results that are substantively equal or desirable (see e.g. Fudge
and Zbyszewska 2015).
For one, a requirement that men and women have equal job tenures
to gain pension eligibility validates only paid employment, and fails to
account for the socially essential yet unpaid care work most women per-
form during their lives. Second, there are practical labour market reali-
ties, such as the fact that women over 50 years of age are more likely to
be unemployed9 either because they are unable to retain or find work
due to discrimination or because they leave employment to provide care
for their grandchildren or older family members (Zbyszewska 2016b;
Stypińska 2014; Kłos 2011; Wilińska 2010). Under such circumstances,
increasing the age of eligibility for retirement pension by an additional
128 A. ZBYSZEWSKA
seven years can plausibly expose women to long periods of financial inse-
curity, especially if they cannot maintain labour market attachment. The
extent to which the Polish state-spending on education, skills training,
and activation of older workers can counteract these tendencies remains
to be seen. It was similarly unclear whether the levels of social expen-
diture that Civic Platform was prepared to maintain were sufficient to
indeed keep older women out of poverty and in good jobs, as envi-
sioned by the party’s Poland 2030 ‘vision’ for the country’s long-term
development.
While the work-family reconciliation measures of the Anti-Crisis Bill
and the pension reforms did represent some efforts at mainstreaming
gender, even if only in a narrow, market-oriented way, the Civic Platform
government’s fiscal consolidation agenda and budget cuts the govern-
ment introduced after 2010 showed a more open disregard for possible
gendered impacts. Family budgets were reduced through restructur-
ing of and cuts to benefits, and liberalization of public services (their
replacement with private delivery) placed child-care access out of reach
for many parents. Indeed, the latter was problematic even for the gov-
ernment’s own employment activation policy, not least because lack of
affordable and accessible child-care facilities was identified among the
key structural obstacles to women’s employment in Poland. The gap in
care provision is a legacy of the Polish transition,10 so it cannot be attrib-
uted to the Civic Platform government’s post-crisis measures alone. On
the contrary, during its administration, the number of child-care spaces
for the youngest children started to gradually increase (Płomień 2009)
since the Civic Platform vowed to see each child placed in a care facil-
ity by 2017 (IAR 2013). However, with liberalization and privatization
constituting the government’s primary strategy—in line also with its fis-
cal consolidation objectives—achieving that promise would be difficult,
especially given that in 2010 only 3 per cent of children under three
were enrolled in such a service (GUS 2010: 272). Indeed, inaccessibility
and unaffordability of the mostly private services meant that enrolment
numbers were also low for children under five, only 50 per cent of whom
were registered in kindergarten or early childhood education in 2011
(European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice/Eurostat 2014), with the
situation being even worse in rural areas where only 37.5 per cent of
children were enrolled in some form of care (public or private; versus 76
per cent of those living in city centres) (Skóra 2013, citing Sadura 2012:
12). These numbers improved by 2014, with the OECD reporting that
GENDERING POLAND’S CRISIS REFORMS: A EUROPEANIZATION PERSPECTIVE 129
74 per cent of children in the three to five group (though only 57 per
cent of three-year-olds) were enrolled in some form of early childhood
education that year, but even that higher figure remained significantly
below the EU-28 average and the Barcelona targets (OECD Family
Database 2014). In addition to privatization of public care delivery, the
Civic Platform administration also continued the historic legacy of cuts
to public education.11 The Education Ministry reported that more than
2000 public schools were closed in a period of five years (from 2007 to
2012); some of these schools have since been replaced by private facili-
ties (Skóra 2013: 3).
Finally, not directly related to the crisis response but worth mentioning
because of its relationship with support for working parents and efforts
at gender mainstreaming, was the Civic Platform government’s 2013
maternity leave reform. Somewhat in contrast to the government’s fiscal
consolidation efforts, this reform enabled extension of the paid portion
of the leave—which is set at 26 weeks, or 6 months, with 100 per cent
income replacement—by an additional 26 weeks, or 6 months (60 per
cent income replacement). On the positive note, the reform permitted
parents to share the latter part of the leave, meaning that fathers could also
take additional time to top off the two-week paternity leave to which they
are entitled. Nonetheless, both feminist critics in Poland (Skóra 2013)
and the European Commission (2013) critiqued these leaves on the basis
that the funds they committed would be better spent on building and
administering more child-care facilities (European Commission 2013).
The Commission also questioned whether a longer leave—which will
most likely be taken up by women not men—was consistent with efforts
to increase women’s labour market participation (European Commission
2013).
Overall, evidence of gender mainstreaming in the context of anti-crisis
measures Poland adopted in the 2009–2014 period suggests a fairly lim-
ited and instrumental attention to how these measures might interact with
existing gender dynamics, or how they might be used to facilitate gender
equality. In so far as the latter, the emphasis on encouraging and sup-
porting women’s employment suggests that the crisis measures conceived
equality and gender mainstreaming fairly narrowly. Measures aimed at
work-family reconciliation or making older (also women) workers attrac-
tive to employers, as well as those in a more direct (coercive) manner
‘encouraging’ women to remain labour-market active for a longer period
of time to qualify for pension, all illustrate this point. At the same time,
130 A. ZBYSZEWSKA
Conclusion
This chapter’s analysis of Poland’s crisis response measures adopted
between 2009 and 2014 sought to contribute a perspective from a CEE
country where the crisis was not as severe as elsewhere in the EU, at
least in the first years after its onset. The extent to which this response
was consistent with, and influenced by, the EU policy directions and
the macroeconomic policy coordination and oversight was considered,
with the view also to Poland’s longer-term process of political-economic
transition. Interpretation of the Polish legislative reforms from this
contextual perspective reveals that the EU’s influence was voluntarily
accepted by the Polish government because the EU recommendations
largely resonated with the already dominant and accepted neoliberal pri-
orities in Polish policy. At the same time, this framing made for an ide-
ational and institutional setting within which only some forms of gender
equality can be advanced.
In political terms, the Civic Platform government’s voluntary sub-
mission cast Poland as among Europe’s neoliberal vanguard, with
Tusk’s leadership recognized and rewarded with the European Council
President post in 2014. Yet, the decision to ignore the social opposi-
tion with which some of these reforms were met was politically costly
at home. The government’s failure to cooperate with trade unions, and
its decision to prioritize tight budgets, good economic performance,
and low unemployment figures over the course of the crisis rang hol-
low with Polish workers facing insecurity and precarious labour mar-
ket conditions. Given this climate, and with a highly fragmented Left
unable to offer a broadly appealing alternative, the call for change and
for more social redistributive and economic interventionist (anti-neo-
liberal) policies, which formed a key element of the incumbent Law and
Justice’s political message, resonated with voters in the run up to the
2015 Presidential and Parliamentary elections. In both, Civic Platform
was unseated by a party who freely combined the populist (and left-
leaning) socio-economic agenda with its hallmark mix of rigid, socially
conservative values, nationalist and Eurosceptic sentiments, and close
affinity with the Catholic Church. Significantly, among the party’s key,
popular promises were the rolling back of the Civic Platform’s retire-
ment age reform by restoring the previous gender-differentiated age lev-
els (60 and 65), and expanding state spending and support of working
132 A. ZBYSZEWSKA
families, including proposed new social transfers for parents, and lower
VAT. While some of the party’s proposals appear to challenge the domi-
nant neoliberal frame, its track record on gender issues is unlikely to
make for a more equality-friendly policy environment either.
Notes
1. Adopted in November 2011 and in force since 13 December 2011,
the ‘six pack’ consists of five regulations and one Directive:
Regulation 1175/2011 amending Regulation 1466/97 On
strengthening of the surveillance of budgetary positions and the
surveillance and coordination of economic policies (23 November
2011); Regulation 1177/2011 amending Regulation 1467/97
On speeding up and clarifying the implementation of the excessive
deficit procedure (23 November 2011); Regulation 1173/2011
On the effective enforcement of budgetary surveillance in the euro
area (23 November 2011); Directive 2011/85/EU On require-
ments for budgetary frameworks of the Member States (8
November 2011); Regulation 1176/2011 On the prevention and
correction of macroeconomic imbalances (23 November 2011);
Regulation 1174/2011 On enforcement action to correct exces-
sive macroeconomic imbalances in the euro area (23 November
2011).
2. See After the Global Financial Crisis: The Road Ahead for Europe,
a 2010 speech by the Managing Director of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, www.imf.org/
external/np/speeches/2010/032910.htm
3. National Development Strategy 2020: Active Society, Competitive
Economy, Efficient State. Attachment to Resolution No 157 of the
Council of Ministers of 25 September 2012, Warsaw.
4. Act of 1 July 2009 r. concerning the Alleviation of the Effects of
the Economic Crisis for Employers and Employees, Journal of
Laws 2009, no. 125 item. 1035.
5. Right-wing Parliamentarians requested similar provisions on behalf
of Polish businesses during debates over a 2002 Labour Code
amendment. The proposal was rejected at the time. See: Members’
proposal concerning the amendment of the Labour Code (Poselski
projekt ustawy o zmianie ustawy Kodeks pracy oraz o zmianie
niektórych innych ustaw), Doc. No. 334 (12 February 2002).
GENDERING POLAND’S CRISIS REFORMS: A EUROPEANIZATION PERSPECTIVE 133
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CHAPTER 7
Stefanie Wöhl
Introduction
The global financial crisis in the years following 2008 has once more
shown how the spheres of production and reproduction are deeply entan-
gled with one another. It highlighted how financialization came into the
realm of private households, as households have been struck by high mort-
gage, rent and credit debt and how financial products like private pen-
sion schemes are part of the social reproduction of households. Financial
markets, international development, international trade and international
direct investments are therefore directly connected to the sphere of pro-
duction and reproduction as Diane Elson has pointed out (Elson 2010).
While there has been much work on the effects of the financial crisis on the
sphere of production and how austerity measures have impacted on gen-
der equality policies and on the labour market participation of women due
to cutbacks in the public sector after 2010 (Rubery 2011; Kurz-Scherf
and Scheele 2013; Klatzer and Schlager 2014), there have been few gen-
S. Wöhl (*)
University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna,
Wohlmutstrasse 22, Vienna A-1020, Austria
Meanwhile, the Single Market in the fields of capital, goods and ser-
vices, and the job market, were deregulated, while monetary policies were
regulated far more strictly (Jessop 2006). In the wake of the Single Market,
more competitiveness was made possible for transnational companies by
the dissolution of non-tariff barriers to trade. Core elements of the imple-
mented policies included less state intervention, rigid budget restrictions
in the member states, a supply-sided employment policy and the consoli-
dation of the European financial markets, all of which were accompanied
by a partial privatization of social security systems, especially the pension
system. This concurred with the third hegemonic project of austerity after
2008 to stabilize economic and monetary policies by implementing fur-
ther budget deficit restrictions for member states and stabilized monetary
policies to keep inflation low. A finance-led regime was thus already estab-
lished throughout the 1990s and 2000s in the EU. Social protection and
gender equality were meanwhile subsumed under economic integration
and led to a gendered selectivity in the European integration modus which
has ever since been materially and discursively framed by liberalization and
competitiveness (Wöhl 2007; Verloo and van der Vleuten 2009).
Furthermore, Bieling and Steinhilber warned against a financialization
of markets into more and other terrains than normally assumed to be prof-
itable, namely housing and state-ownership assets as early as 2001. What
we have encountered as the financial crisis hit the EU after 2008 was a
trajectory well prepared for these financial investments. Financial deregu-
lation and the advancement of financial products into private households
took place as a strategy of financialization, similar as in already much more
liberalized market economies such as the US and Great Britain. Financial
products such as private pension schemes, privatized health and elderly
care provisioning entered households in the late 1990s and at the begin-
ning of the new millennium also in more coordinated market economies.
Terms of trade were far more liberalized by then, and a discourse of per-
sonal responsibility fostered welfare state debates into a direction, where
even people who normally did not speculate on financial markets wanted
to own assets to earn money more quickly. This process went hand in hand
with welfare state deregulation even in conservative welfare states like
Austria and Germany. The newly elected social-democratic government
in Germany under Gerhard Schroeder (1998–2005) fostered privatization
and a reregulation of the employment market and downsized welfare state
benefits after 1998. The conservative Merkel government and Wolfgang
Schäuble profited from these policies as Germany developed into the most
THE GENDER DYNAMICS OF FINANCIALIZATION AND AUSTERITY... 143
export lead country within the EU with zero deficit by 2016 and promot-
ing tight fiscal policies in the EU after 2008.
While credit debt has for a long time also been a form of trustworthiness
into personal payment capacities and credibility in the US, the discourse of
long-term personal savings in private bank accounts has for a much longer
time succeeded in countries such as Austria and Germany. Meanwhile,
the financialization of social reproduction into households and commu-
nities across Britain, Ireland and the US took place, fostering consumer
credit and micro-credit schemes (Allon 2014). Personal debt also rose in
countries that had not followed this path until the mid-2000s. In more
liberal market economies such as Ireland, the US and Great Britain, the
effect of this for households became evident after the sub-prime bubble
burst in the US in 2008, since very low-income households were adversely
affected by this. Especially the sub-prime credit market in the US showed
that credits were given to minority, low-income women as explored in the
following section.
respect the provisions of the treaty (Wöhl 2016). The Six-pack legislation
meanwhile strengthens the Stability and Growth Pact through a process
of competitive restructuring (for details, Bruff and Wöhl 2016; see also
Weiner and MacRae in this volume). The effects of these economic gover-
nance measures led to a tightening of fiscal and monetary policies within
the EU, leaving no or little adjustments for member states not to follow
this trajectory or for gender equality policies to evolve further (Klatzer and
Schlager 2014).
Ireland was one of the countries seeking bailout from the supranational
level in November 2010 and whose budget deficit exceeded by far the
European state debt threshold. Four banks had to be nationalized to avoid
economic breakdown. In the following case study, the Irish economic and
political situation will be explored in more detail, focusing especially on
homeownership and credit indebtedness in the first part. I then situate
these developments within the broader politics of austerity implemented
in Ireland, asking if resistance against austerity measures is likely to occur
more in the years to follow and if a change of policies is about to happen
with the advent of a new government coalition elected in 2016.
the years between 2008 and 2013. Ireland had to nationalize the biggest
national bank in 2008 as a result of the financial crisis and pay-cuts and
pay-freezes in the private and public sector succeeded. By 2011, 75% of
sovereign debt was caused by bank debt. A total of 64 billion Euro of
taxpayer’s money was needed to recapitalize banks, which concurs with
40% of GDP.
The government in Ireland had to agree in 2010 within a Memoranda
of Understanding to lend money from the European Stability Mechanism
to stabilize the country’s economy. These Memoranda meanwhile impose
strict austerity measures, especially in public sectors like education, health
and care services, and on other public goods and services. This implies that
private households have ever since become the target for an ‘accumula-
tion by dispossession’, targeting households in countries which have long
traditions of buying rather than renting home property like in Ireland.
This has happened not only by households taking up credit loans and
mortgage payments, but also by the respective governments themselves
aligning with these neoliberal policies of financialization, for example, by
introducing new incentives and reduced taxes in Ireland for buying prop-
erty. Wage cuts and cuts to community services (similar as in Spain, Greece
and Portugal) were implemented after 2010, while more privatization and
public/private partnerships in Ireland’s housing sector evolved already
before 2008 (O’Callaghan et al. 2015). Creditors meanwhile have more
and more difficulties to pay back mortgages, but there is no case study yet
on gendered segregated data on sub-prime loans.
In contrast to Spain, there were no massive evictions, because only
credits taken up after 2009 allowed for banks to reclaim the property, but
this has changed recently. Evictions were relatively high, including illegal
evictions, especially in the private rent sector (DG Social Affairs 2016, 72).
Studies on mortgage arrears also show that recipients are often in arrear to
pay back their loans due to loss of income or unemployment (McCarthy
2014; Murphy and Scott 2013). Especially low-income families or single
parents have the most difficulties. Women were adversely affected by this
situation considering their low-income status. Female-headed households
were ‘2.6 times more likely to be in housing-related arrears’ (DG Justice
2013, 178). The government also reduced expenses for social housing
since 2008 by one-third. Rent supplements have been cut by 11%, which
means poor households and women will be troubled the most (TASC
2015, 15). Utility arrears rose by 30% between 2010 and 2013 (DG Social
Affairs 2016, 23). This situation is especially viral in the greater Dublin
148 S. WÖHL
area, where rents have increased massively. In July 2015, ‘almost 5,000
people were homeless…including 1,495 children’ (TASC 2015, 16).
Another feature of the housing crisis are the effects for social services
and support for women in need: the child and family agency Tusla reported
that 80% of women fleeing domestic violence in Dublin had to be turned
away because there was no accommodation for them (ibid.). Apart from
this, there have been cases where women committed suicide on the day
of their eviction (DG Social Affairs 2016, 35). There is a 17.6% increase
of evictions between 2010 to 2013 initiated by local authorities, but an
increase of 137.3% evictions by private rented tenancy boards and an 111%
increase by regulated mortgage lenders taking their property back (ibid.,
77). This concerns also the greater Dublin area. Courts in Ireland ‘regu-
larly suspend eviction proceedings on a discretionary basis, often with a
final date of execution up to two years later’ (ibid., 191). This might also
be the reason why the numbers of evictions have been relatively low up to
2015 in EU comparison.
All of these developments in Ireland are due to privatization and more
credit-based homeownership already during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years. They
foster competitiveness, privatization and less public spending. They align
with more power given to executive branches of states, and tightening
the scope for member states to take independent fiscal measures to reach
the new deficit goals (Bruff and Wöhl 2016). As described in the pre-
vious section concerning homeownership in the US, a similar trajectory
can be found in Ireland. Indebtedness through mortgage lending has
reached high levels in the years pre- and post-2008, especially in the urban
areas surrounding Dublin. In Ireland, mortgage lending has been widely
deregulated and real house prices already increased by 180% in the period
between 1995 and 2006, more than in Spain (105%), the US (69%) and
the UK (133%) in the same period (Murphy and Scott 2013, 36).
The rapid rise of mortgage debt in Ireland is also due to the fact that
buy-to-let property investments rose, mortgages without required deposits
and mortgages with longer durations were initiated, leading to liberalized
mortgage markets being a facilitator for home-owners in need of credit,
to home-owners being more financially exploitable. This situation fuelled
the rise of the construction market and residential and rural development,
leading eventually to property boom and bust in Ireland after 2008. The
Irish mortgage debt to GDP ratio was at the high level of 80% in 2008,
while the EU average was 50% at the time (ibid.). Tax reliefs had been cre-
ated for housing development in rural areas prior to 2008, to repopulate
THE GENDER DYNAMICS OF FINANCIALIZATION AND AUSTERITY... 149
sector are in arrear more than 90 days. It seems that the sub-prime mar-
ket will pose serious social problems in the future, as mentioned by the
government response in 2014 to the parliamentary inquiry. People who
cannot afford a regular credit, have a poor credit history or need a credit
quickly are the main sub-prime lenders, meaning that women are likely to
be among them most often.
Sub-prime lenders are not regular banks and therefore do not fall under
the Mortgage Arrear Resolution Targets foreseen by the Irish govern-
ment. This is one of the main points of debate as well as the fact that
sub-prime lenders charge far higher rates than their banking counterparts
and follow an aggressive legal strategy if borrowers fall into arrear. Already
in 2008, Ireland had the second highest rent or mortgage arrears within
the EU-27 next to France (Russell et al. 2011). This is due to the fact
that tax incentives were given to property development and Irish lend-
ers ‘increased their lending by 466% to property and financial sectors’
(McCrea and Moran 2014, 3). This also had an effect on taxes, because
the state relied mostly on taxes on property and construction and gave
income tax reliefs in 2015, which people earning over 70,000 euros prof-
ited from the most (TASC 2015, 8 ff.). This means poor or middle range
income households and women with low income do not profit from this
situation. In 2008, a new guarantee was already given to banks that depos-
itors and bondholders both secured and unsecured were backed up by the
Irish state (McCrea and Moran 2014). Meanwhile, 38% of private house-
holds are still indebted in Ireland.
Austerity in Ireland
Ireland was considered as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ in the years between 1990 and
2001 and for a shorter period between 2003 and 2007 because of high
economic growth due to foreign direct investment and a fast-growing
construction sector. A wave of immigration led many people, especially
from Poland and other new member states, to come to work in Ireland
in this period. While more (neo-)liberal elements evolved in the 1990s,
the Irish welfare state still relies on the family and a strong catholic tradi-
tion with strict abortion rules (McLaughlin 1993). Wage cost reduction,
cuts in public spending and restricting union power in their capacity to
negotiate through the social partner model called ‘National Partnership
Agreements’ were already implemented in the Celtic Tiger years (Allen
2000, 15 ff.).
THE GENDER DYNAMICS OF FINANCIALIZATION AND AUSTERITY... 151
Since cuts in public spending and only moderate wage raises occurred
during the Celtic Tiger years, more and more people fell into poverty since
2008. Cuts in welfare services especially hit those on the lowest incomes
hardest by the budgetary changes (OECD 2014a). Health care expen-
diture by the government fell by 7% since the onset of the crisis (OECD
2014b, 52) and larger out of pocket payments, hitting vulnerable and
low-income groups most, augmented. Low-income households were also
adversely affected by the cuts to social transfers and by changes to taxa-
tion, specifically the introduction of the Universal Social Charge, widen-
ing of tax bands and reduction in tax credits (Barry and Conroy, 2014). As
women are concentrated in lower income groups, they suffered a dispro-
portionate impact. Everyday costs of living have augmented since 2010
especially those affecting women and private households such as childcare
costs, hospital services, monthly rent and bus fares (Oxfam 2014). The
maximum retirement age will be raised from 65 to 68 years of age until
2028 and pension entitlements have been reduced. Cuts have also been
made to care allowance, disability payment, one parent family payment
and a range of other former welfare services. In 2009 child benefit pay-
ments were not only reduced, but also restricted to a certain age. Since
the Irish welfare model still relies on a strong male-breadwinner norm,
reduction in childcare, state infrastructure and elderly care arrangements
especially hit women more than men.
Concerning employment, the loss of paid work was the highest in 2013
for both women (11% unemployed) and men (17,7% unemployed), hav-
ing increased rapidly since 2008, with a rise in youth unemployment up
to 30,8% until April 2013, the peak of unemployment in Ireland. The
long-term unemployment rate in Ireland was the highest in comparison
to all OECD countries between 2007 and 2012, with a 30% rise in the
more than one-year unemployed compared to the total unemployed in
Ireland within this time span. Involuntary part-time employment for men
rose up to the high level of 53,2% of the total part-time employment rate,
while women’s involuntary part-time employment rose by 8% between
2007 and 2012, and by 4% for men in the same years (OECD 2014b,
99). While there is an increase of full-time working hours, especially the
employment of immigrants fell in comparison to native-born Irish and
immigrants returned to their countries of origin because of job-losses. The
emigration of over 400,000 Irish citizens abroad from which 4 out of 10
were under 24 years of age also shows how hard the crisis has affected the
lives of young people (Oxfam 2014, 2). Meanwhile, 23% of households in
152 S. WÖHL
and moral assumptions might play a role in the Irish case, but it cannot
be the only reason. Ireland has had a long history of uprising between
religious groups in the North and against displacements. The years prior
to the crisis of harsh neoliberal restructuring and tax evasion for big com-
panies have paved the way for a strong sentiment of injustice, since Irish
taxpayers have had to carry the burden of the banking crisis.
Cannon and Murphy identify several reasons why local actions focusing
on specific policies have taken place more than big-scale events, comparing
the Irish situation to Latin America, Spain and Greece. Ireland’s peripheral
locality and rurality led to a more authoritarian and conformity seeking
popular culture in civil society, they argue, creating a more ‘religious-
ethnic conceptualisation of nation’ than of representational citizenship
(Cannon and Murphy 2015, 12). This leads to an absence of broader new
social movements in regard to austerity. They define three main tenden-
cies why this has happened: ‘mainstream, state or business-led framing
and associational exercises supportive of neoliberalism; second defensive,
reformist and renovative associational and discourse exercises which seek
to reform the state and/or neoliberalism (…); and anti-capitalist groups
which seek to challenge the state, capitalism as well as neoliberalism’ as a
whole (Cannon and Murphy 2015, 13). But the latter were never able to
challenge the ideological framing of crisis responses by the government,
especially after the elections of 2011. Rather, progressive forces, which
sought to counter the narrative of neoliberal reform, were also ‘blamed
for the crisis (…) which vilified public sector workers and trade unions as
at least partially responsible for the crisis, pitting these against private sec-
tor, non-unionized workers’ (ibid., 13). Instead, welfare fraud was put up
against welfare recipients, distinguishing them from taxpayers who were
claimed to be citizens and supported by initiatives like ‘Your country, Your
Call’ which promoted entrepreneurial citizenship (ibid., 14).
Another feature was that Ireland had to seek a bailout under the condi-
tions of the former Troika, leaving little room for civil society organizations
to influence the agenda or the government on a larger scale. Ever since,
core executive branches of the state have established advisory councils and
boards, like the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council to monitor the fiscal targets
aligned within the Fiscal Compact Treaty and fulfilling conditions set by
the European Commission. A new ministry for Public Expenditure and
Reform (PER) was created and a new sub-cabinet comprising the Prime
Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and
Trade, the Finance Minister and Minister for PER (Cannon and Murphy
154 S. WÖHL
and their children were evicted from rented housing. For this reason, the
network has also organized trainings together with the Platform Against
Housing Evictions movement in Spain, to learn from their experience. The
National Women’s Council of Ireland is also strong in criticizing the gov-
ernment concerning recent pension changes for part-time workers, which
would concern especially women if it comes into force. Across the country
and in the urban areas of Dublin, anti-eviction protest and movements on
different issues have evolved, including women’s reproductive rights and
the Irish Housing Network is seeking to include movements and unions
to join forces with other single issue movements (see in detail Cullen and
Murphy 2016).
Conclusions
As described, the politics of financialization in the EU as a whole and
in Ireland in particular have had twofold effects for policy making after
2008: On the one hand, hegemonic projects of neoliberal restructuring
within the EU had already paved the way for more privatization and pri-
vate households taking up consumer or credit debt and relying on more
privatized welfare services. On the other hand, the discourse on privati-
zation and finance-led innovation has led to a new identity framing of
citizens as consumers and customers rather than citizens with a right to
social protection and social cohesion. In the Irish case, this has led to a
politics of privatization on different levels concerning public-private part-
nerships in the housing sector, to tax havens for international companies,
including unions into this neoliberal agenda. At the same time, more and
more people have fallen into poverty in Ireland since 2008, with women
being especially affected by low-wage or part-time work and less funding
possibilities for daily care and public services. The social reproduction of
households has been massively hit by cuts to social services and by arrears
in mortgages, rent and sub-prime loans. Future gendered aggregated data
on (sub-prime) loans and research is necessary to investigate into gendered
household care constraints and gendered effects in social reproduction on
household and community levels to elaborate the gendered dimension of
the housing crisis in still more detail. Meanwhile, resistance against auster-
ity and housing evictions has gained ground, at least with the last election
of 2016, showing that a broader front against austerity has evolved, which
is not only focusing on single issues, such as the campaign against water
charges, but has a broader focus on the agenda. If this will lead to change
to a more equal society in the near future is still an open process though.
156 S. WÖHL
Notes
1. A situation we have experienced especially concerning Greece in
2015, when the newly elected government by Alexis Tsipras was
forced to accept more austerity measures in return for loans that
would allow Greece to avoid bankruptcy.
2. See http://www.thejournal.ie/sub-prime-loans-ireland-1996667-
Mar2015/ (last accessed 10.03.2016) for more information.
3. See http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/election-2016/ (last
accessed 11.03.2016).
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Ana Prata
Introduction
The recent economic crisis affecting Southern European countries has
been singular in both its intensity and complexity, and as such, it has had
a profound impact on the economic, political, social, and institutional
realms. However, we still know very little about how discourse regard-
ing the economic crisis and austerity policies was constructed by different
actors and about different actors.
Portugal suffered two consecutive economic recessions, one following
the international financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the other following
the European sovereign debt crisis. In 2011, the country received a bail-
out package from the international financial institutions—the ‘Troika’,
but in return had to commit to implement drastic ‘adjustment programs’
A. Prata (*)
Department of Sociology, California State University Northridge,
18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8318, USA
that would rebalance its budget and meet fiscal consolidation demands
(Armingeon and Baccaro 2012, 254). This led to three years of large-scale
cuts in social expenditure, public sector reforms, and tax increases (Freire,
Lisi and Viegas 2015). Although the economic crisis is a complex phenom-
enon affecting both men and women, research has shown that austerity-
driven measures adopted to alleviate the crisis have had disproportionally
adverse consequences for women (Ferreira 2014; Karamessini and Rubery
2014). Indeed, a 2013 Eurobarometer poll1 shows that women, more
than men, perceive that the economic crisis led to an increase in the
pay gap, to more violence towards women, and to more job insecurity.
Moreover, data from the 2014 Gender Equality Report2 shows that it is
among Southern European citizens that gender inequality issues are more
of a concern.3
Recent policy debates in Portugal have started to address the impacts
of several years of economic crisis and austerity policies on women rela-
tive to men. Particularly, the effects of these policies on gender equality
in employment, on what the retrenchment of the welfare state represents
for women, on increasing domestic violence, and on the decline of birth
rates. However, we do not know how these specific dimensions gained
visibility vis-á-vis other potential gendered concerns. In fact, there is little
research addressing how discourse on women and gender has been con-
structed by politicians during the crisis. Was gender inequality mentioned
in tandem with a range of other social inequalities in Portuguese parlia-
mentary debates? Is there a perception that the recession affected women
more than men? Are female MPs, compared to male MPs, more actively
voicing the gendered impacts of the crisis? These are some of the central
questions this chapter engages with. The structure of the chapter is as fol-
lows, a theoretical overview regarding political discourse and discursive
representation; an assessment of women experiences during the crisis; a
methodology section; and the empirical section and analysis of parliamen-
tary discourse on women and gender.
causes of the economic crisis, those responsible, those affected, and its
prospects. All of this with the intent to influence the public’s perceptions
and to construct a narrative regarding the most affected groups and the
most viable solutions (An and Gower 2009). As Freire (2013, 69) sum-
marizes it, the economic crisis is a phenomenon constructed by distinct
social, political, and economic actors and such constructions, such mean-
ings, are both descriptive and performative, they describe and create the
reality of the economic crisis. In Portugal, state actors and parliamentary
members are among the most influential political actors in the economic
crisis. In fact, Moury and Standring argue that discursively there was a
strengthening of the executive power during the economic crisis and
a de-legitimation of non-state actors (2015, 4–5). Thus, parliamentary
members appear as crucial actors involved in an ideological and gendered
construction of meanings to the public, in which they are both in a privi-
leged position to incorporate differences of power, and to give rise to
particular relations of power. Following a Foucauldian perspective, the
‘reality of the economic crisis’ cannot be known or interpreted outside of
discourse, since we must conceive ‘discourse as a violence which we do to
things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them’ (Foucault
1984, 127).
I argue that silencing or voicing a particular social group is an active
construction of meaning and a performance in claim making (Saward
2006). If the political system does not address women’s reality, their
experiences, their struggles, women lack substantive representation
(Pitkin 1967) and do not see themselves in politics. Thus, the lack
of discursive representation impacts the substantive representation
of women and can further alienate women from the political process.
Dryzek and Niemeyer argue that democracy entails also the representa-
tion of discourses not just persons or groups (2008, 481). Therefore,
it is in the women’s interest that their experiences are accounted for in
parliamentary debates, since those both reflect and influence political
decision-making.
Women’s discursive representation can occur in two main ways, one
is through the recognition of women as a separate and relevant social
category. The second is through the acknowledgment of an unequally
gendered balance of power (Wängnerud 2000, 70). One facet of represen-
tation is defined as the ‘substantive acting for other’ (Pitkin 1967), so the
way in which women and gender inequality are captured in parliamentary
discourse, the kind of visibility given by MPs to women and to gender
164 A. PRATA
issues, is reflective not only of what representatives ‘do’, but also of the
creative and interactive process of constructing a narrative about the ‘real-
ity’ of the economic crisis and those affected.
Research on women in the era of post-crisis austerity has argued that the
global financial crisis has launched ‘a set of profound cultural shifts’ (Negra
and Tasker 2014), and that austerity policies represent ‘a critical juncture’
for gender and social regimes at the EU level and at the country and
regional levels (Karamessini and Rubery 2014; Paleo and Alonso 2015).
In Portugal, there has been some research on how the economic cri-
sis and women and austerity policies have impacted women and gender
equality. But there is far less work on political representation and political
discourse on women and gender (Espírito-Santo and Lisi 2015, 430). My
research addresses this gap and builds on the current literature on auster-
ity in order to understand how these challenges women were facing are
discursively constructed.
Most of the impacts during the crisis and austerity in Portugal affected
the labor market, labor relations, unionism, and the restructuring of the
welfare state and public sector (Costa 2014; Ferreira 2011; Guerreiro
2014; Leite et al., 2014; Natali and Stamati 2014). Male employment
was hit first by the crisis in 2009 (particularly the manufacturing and
construction sectors), while women’s employment started contracting a
year later, mostly due to job losses in agriculture, manufacturing and pri-
vate households (Ferreira 2014, 213–215). Unemployment affected men
and women of all age groups4 and impacted the consumption habits and
nutritional choices of families5 (Wall et al. 2015). As unemployment rose
throughout the crisis, it affected mostly those with less education, while
graduates were the least affected (Wall et al. 2015, 31; Ferreira 2014,
219).
The recession’s impact was not the same across all social groups.
Some economic sectors and groups were the worst affected by the cri-
sis: younger male and female workers, female self-employed workers, civil
servants, domestic employees, unpaid family workers, and fixed-term con-
tract workers (Ferreira 2014, 219).
Unemployment was a major contributor to poverty since the outset
of the economic crisis. Children (0–17 years old) were the age group at
the highest risk of poverty, a risk that increases considerably depending
THE VISIBILITY (AND INVISIBILITY) OF WOMEN AND GENDER... 165
care, and community support (Wall and Escobedo 2013; Amâncio 2007;
Monteiro and Ferreira 2015).
In conclusion, to better understand the total dimension of the gender-
specific impact of the economic crisis, one has to analyze not only its
impact on economic constraints, on changes in health care regimes, or
on the retrenchment of the welfare state, but also how all these changes,
in turn, influenced the social dynamics of gender relations. Santos (2011,
76) provides an example of just such a dynamic. When the state makes
substantial cuts in social provisions, society needs to balance the retreating
of the welfare state. Women then take on that role and are overrepresented
in doing so, but in the process, traditional gender roles are reinforced and
women tend to lose autonomy.
cultural practice and links that to how values and attitudes are presented
and how they express vested interests. This is a methodological approach
well suited for a gender analysis.
Frames are also a powerful mechanism that define, construct, and make
sense of causes, problems, and potential solutions regarding the economic
crisis and austerity policies. Discourse makes certain utterances possible
while it suppresses others—the ideological machination of discourse
(Ferree et al. 2002).
Data collection started with selecting within parliamentary debates the
main keywords for the study: ‘austerity’ and ‘economic crisis’. Once those
debates and documents were located, another set of words were searched
within that data. Those words were woman/women, wife/husband,
mother/father, gender, feminine/masculine/feminist, and female worker,
as well as the plural form of these words. Data were analyzed primarily by
looking at the utterance of these specific words, a unit smaller than the
debate or the document as a whole.
All parliamentary debates were available online through the Parliament
official website (http://debates.parlamento.pt/search.aspx?cid=r3.dar)
and data were collected online from February to May of 2015. The terms
austerity (austeridade) and economic crisis (crise económica) were searched
to determine low and high utterance of those terms per debate and per
year. Parliamentary debates with only one or two utterances were excluded
from the sample, but all the debates with three or more utterances were
included. All of the high-incidence debates were coded and analyzed for
both austerity and economic crisis. A total of 3956 utterances of the words
‘austerity’ and ‘economic crisis’ were coded and used to locate utterances
on ‘women and gender’.
Several coding instruments were used to trace political discourse. The
unit of analysis is the utterance in the parliamentary debates. An utter-
ance is the speech act or statement produced by a single speaker (Ferree
et al. 2002, 50). The coding procedure was to first code each utterance
with regard to the speaker (political party of the MP, in government or
opposition, gender of the MP), and second to code all the idea elements
contained in each utterance. Often times, ideas were grouped into clusters
of ideas that were similar even across different frames.
Once the data were coded, I also included framing typically used when
analyzing any type of crisis. I used a set of crisis frames and adapted those
to the economic crisis and austerity policies and how women and gender
enter the discourse.
170 A. PRATA
Table 8.2 Utterances of ‘women and gender’ within the overall debate (Parliament
2008-2014)
# of utterances 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 TOTAL
Fig. 8.2 Utterances of ‘women and gender’ within the overall debate (Parliament
2008-2014)
the main idea elements that are present when we break down the category
of ‘women and gender’ into all its components. Second, I look at what
were the most prevalent frames of ‘women and gender’ within the parlia-
mentary debates on the economic crisis and austerity. In both approaches,
speakers are taken into account in order to grasp who were the MPs sub-
stantively representing women in Parliament.
(…) we know that women are the biggest victims of unemployment among
this cataclysm of unemployment that the country faces. We know that
women have lower salaries than men. We know that women are subject
to greater precariousness… so naturally the Government has responsibility.
(Female MP, Green Party, DR 7/9/2014)
200
160
120
80
40
0
TOTAL
'woman' ‘gender' 'feminist'
'mother' 'father' ‘female worker'
(…) the Portuguese were the victims of a brutal increase in [price of] trans-
portation; yesterday we learned the record numbers of unemployment and
that women are the main victims of unemployment, precariousness and low
wages. Even in austerity there is gender discrimination! … the policies of
this Government have excavated the crisis and have made women its victims.
(Female MP, Left Bloc, DR 2/2/2012)
(…) the scenario is even darker and harder for women. We live in a profound
economic and social crisis, where once again women are in the front line of
unemployment, of precariousness, of low wages, and low pensions. Women
make up most of the 400 000 workers getting minimum wage. … Women
and children are the biggest percentage of those living below the poverty
line. (Female MP, Communist Party, DR 2/2/2012)
They are victims when pregnant and they are victims when mothers, they
receive lower wages and when they don’t get fired—and being fired is recur-
ring in these situations—… they take a pay cut! These are unacceptable
discriminations. (Female MP, Left Bloc, 3/9/2013)
with the latest [price] increases announced… A family with a father, mother
and two children who live in central Lisbon spend over 36 euros more per
month on transportation. If they have to commute from Sintra to Lisbon…
the monthly fee increases to 100 euros. This is unaffordable! (Female MP,
Left Bloc, 6/22/2012)
The fathers of the financial, economic, and social instability of our country
now want to add to that legacy also political instability. (Male MP, Social
Democratic Party, 4/4/2013)
The illusion, the spending, and the debt are the progenitors of austerity,
and these politicians some of who speak here … are the biological fathers of
the strain the country is experiencing. (Male MP, Social Democratic Party,
10/31/2012)
176 A. PRATA
While social provisions are stolen and child benefits are taken away affect-
ing more than 1.25 million children, while women are pushed into
poverty and accept new forms of slavery such as the exploitation from
prostitution, and they accept it as inevitable in times of crisis. At the same
time, you give banks 12 000 million of euros… to some all sacrifices are
demanded while others are handed privileges. (Male MP, Communist
Party, 3/22/2012)
This ‘social justice’ frame is often used by left-wing MPs to questions the
priorities, the morality, and even the justice of the austerity policies of the
government.
In regards to speakers, we find some outstanding results. The MPs who
voice women’s victimization and women’s struggles in Parliament are
mostly female MPs and mostly from left-wing parties. In fact, more than
70% of all utterances on ‘women and gender’ can be traced back to MPs
from the Left Bloc, the Communists, and the Greens. Politically, voicing
women in Parliament is part of an on overall left-wing party strategy of
criticizing the policies of the center-right coalition government. This find-
ing is consistent with research from Freire, Lisi, and Viegas (2015, 406)
that demonstrates that MPs’ critiques of the economic crisis tend to follow
the traditional ideological cleavages of left and right. Thus, it is mostly the
left-wing parties (and the radical left-wing) that contest the center-right
coalition, while Socialists tend to be more cooperative.
THE VISIBILITY (AND INVISIBILITY) OF WOMEN AND GENDER... 177
Across all political parties, female MPs are the ones giving women’s
issues visibility. And among those, it was mostly the left-wing female
MPs who were responsible for most of the discursive representation of
women in the parliamentary debates on the economic crisis. Although
this group was a minority, compared to the majority of male MPs, or even
to the female MPs from the Socialist and Social Democratic parties, they
were nonetheless overrepresented as speakers within these parliamentary
debates.
Finally, another way ‘women and gender’ appear on economic crisis’
discourse is also through symbolic dates, collective actions of women’s
movements, and anti-austerity mobilizations. All these contributed to
increase the visibility of ‘women and gender’ in parliamentary discourse.
The Women’s International Day, the 25th of April, a petition from the
Women’s Democratic Movement, and anti-austerity mobilizations are all
examples of how political events or collective actions create opportuni-
ties for the discursive representation of women in Parliament. Here is an
example:
What do you have to say to those that demonstrated in the streets on the
15th and the 21st, and that will demonstrate this Saturday? How can you
tell the men and women that have no work, that can’t support their fami-
lies, that the government is honoring their word? (Female MP, Left Bloc,
9/28/2012)
Conclusion
In parliamentary discourse, ‘women and gender’ as issues have had their
own history throughout the economic crisis. From being neglected dur-
ing the first four years, to constituting a separate and relevant social cat-
egory in discourse after 2012.
178 A. PRATA
Notes
1. The Eurobarometer report on this poll was accessed on 5/2/2013
and is available on the website http://www.europarl.europa.eu/
pdf/eurobarometre/2013/femme/synth_PT.pdf
2. Source: Special Eurobarometer 428, Gender Equality Report,
March 2014. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-
equality/files/documents/eurobarometer_report_2015_en.pdf
3. In Spain, Greece, and Portugal views on the ‘need to tackle gender
inequality’ and that ‘Equality between men and women is a funda-
mental right’ are the most widespread within the EU countries (97
% to 99 %).
4. From 2010 to 2013 the number of unemployed couples registered
in employment centers increased 688 % (Wall et al. 2015).
5. A few studies have begun to address how food-insecurity increased
in Portugal throughout the crisis (Duarte 2014; Wall et al. 2015)
6. Austerity measures were the result of the implementation by the
Portuguese government of what was agreed upon in the 2011
Memorandum of Agreement following the financial assistance
(78,000 million euros) provided by the IMF, the European Central
Bank, and the European Commission (the Troika). In return
Portugal had to commit itself to a fiscal consolidation strategy and
to make structural reforms in several sectors (labor market, judicial
system, health system, housing and services, etc.).
7. The Memorandum Agreement increases the weekly hours worked
by public workers from 35 to 40 hours.
8. From 1999 to 2010, 61.1% of Portuguese women were employed
(ages 15–64), while the EU average for the same time period was
59.5 % (Casaca 2012: 119).
9. Employers tend to offer part-time work mostly to women and
women due to ideological and practical constrains ‘opt’ for this
work (Casaca 2012:33).
10. Wall et al. also mention the crucial role of grandparents as part of
this support network that helped buffer some of the adverse conse-
quences of the economic crisis (2015:189).
11. Among the EU15, Portugal placed fourth on reported anxiety and
feelings of sadness, and third on citizens feeling depressed.
According to Serra this decline on mental health is undoubtedly
linked to the economic crisis and to the implementation of auster-
ity measures (2014: IX).
180 A. PRATA
12. Although it follows a long-term and steady reduction that has been
happening since the 1970s.
13. A notable exception was the significant mobilization of women’s
organizations during the struggle for abortion decriminalization
(Prata 2012).
14. Only in the small left-wing party, Bloco de Esquerda, women occupy
leadership positions and are represented above 30 % (Verge and
Espírito Santo 2014; Jiménez 2009, 236).
15. This happens independently of the ideological orientation of the
government, with no significant statistical difference if the govern-
ment is center-right or center-left. Women are only 7.1 % of all
nominations for top political office and they tend to be more rep-
resented when there is a one-party government instead of a coali-
tion (Lisboa, et al. 2006, 179–182).
16. Following austerity policies, significant cuts were made to the bud-
get of women’s state agencies. This resulted in eliminating or
defunding gender equality programs, and led to the restructuring
of the equality machinery (Monteiro and Ferreira 2012, 18).
17. In Portugal, the center-right PPD-PSD has often been the govern-
ing party, and its female party members have reported the pressure
to ‘act as male politicians’, and not to tackle gender-related issues
due to fears of damaging their political careers (Jiménez 2009, 259).
18. DR, 1/23/2010, n.25, p.18.
19. DR, 7/1/2011, n.3, p.13
20. The economic crisis/austerity is constructed in terms of the eco-
nomic impacts on women or gender issues.
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CHAPTER 9
Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel
Introduction
In this chapter, we examine the fate of minority women’s intersectional
activism against austerity measures. We explore how the 2008 economic
crisis and subsequent austerity measures serve to misrecognise and
oftentimes erase the experiences and perspectives of minority women in
Scotland, England and France. As a framework for understanding this
moment of political and economic uncertainty, we argue that minor-
ity women do not and cannot fit the hegemonic narrative of ‘the cri-
sis’ because the crisis names and legitimises the exceptional experiences
of the economically privileged (Strolovitch, 2013; Emejulu and Bassel
2015). Even though minority women have had to navigate what we call
A. Emejulu (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick,
Social Sciences Building, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK
L. Bassel
Department of Sociology, University of Leicester,
Attenborough Tower, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
women have distinctive patterns to their political behaviour that are often
ignored, misrecognised or devalued in the wider political science litera-
ture and in the formal practice of politics (Sudbury 1998; Hill Collins
2000; Bassel and Emejulu 2014; Emejulu and Bassel 2015). ‘Political
behaviour’ is typically defined as political participation in formal institu-
tional structures and organised political activities. Thus voting, being a
political party or trade union activist, taking part in demonstrations and
standing for election are usually what counts as legitimate political action.
Because minority women are underrepresented in these traditional politi-
cal spaces it appears as if minority women are absent from politics, or
worse, operate largely as apolitical agents. It is only when we redefine
‘what counts’ as politics and political behaviour that the diverse ways
in which minority women undertake political action becomes visible. As
Patricia Hill Collins (2000: 201) argues ‘survival is a form of resistance
and…struggles to provide for the survival of…children represent the
foundations of Black women’s activism’. Certainly, Hill Collins is analys-
ing the particular history of African American women’s struggle but her
wider point about the need to recognise and value the political actions of
Black women in both public and private spaces is central to our under-
standings of minority women’s political behaviour in Europe. We will
now turn to explore minority women’s persistent precarity that predates
the 2008 economic crisis.
and pathological presence’ (Mirza 2015) and how this shapes both our
understanding of social problems and the public and policy debates about
possible policy interventions.
In France, we see similar issues at play in terms of racialised groups’
invisibility and hypervisibility in terms of policy recognition and action
on poverty and economic inequality. During the 2005 Paris riots, the for-
mer interior minister and president, Nicolas Sarkozy, infamously called
the rioters ‘racaille (scum) who needed to be hosed down by water can-
non’ (Winter 2008: 258). In this controversial statement, Sarkozy made
visible to rift between français de souche (white, native born French) and
français issues de l' immigration (second-generation immigrant French).
The deterioration of les banlieues, routinised police violence and the eco-
nomic inequalities that French people of colour experience are regarded
as the private, invisible problems of the racialised poor. When the social
order is disrupted, as we saw in 2005, French minorities become, in
themselves, a hypervisible problem of the failures of republican assimila-
tionist social policies. The debates over the hijab, the burkini and halal
food become key markers of anti-Frenchness and the policy of laïcité
(secularism) is weaponised as a disciplining device to defend authen-
tic (read: white) ‘Frenchness’ from alien Others (Bassel 2012; Delphy
2015).
The economic and social disparities that minority groups face are
hardly new and we have not outlined anything particularly groundbreak-
ing here for scholars of race and ethnicity. However, Dara Strolovitch
(2013: 169–170) helpfully reminds us that ‘it is not inevitable that a bad
thing will be defined and treated as bad, much less that it will be regarded
as a crisis’. She goes on to argue that minority groups ‘are thus regarded…
as the perpetuators of their own crises which are attributable to individual
defects or cultural dysfunctions’. Thus what is important here to remem-
ber when we think about minority groups and their ‘invisible’ crises of
unemployment and poverty is that the very ordinariness of their experi-
ences combined with the construction of some racial, ethnic and gender
intersections as problematic serve to help to privatise the public issue of
their persistent precarity. Lest that we attribute the privatisation of public
issues as solely a problem for minority groups, it is important to note how
the experiences of white working-class men and boys, in particular the
sharp declines in their educational and economic outcomes in England,
are also classified as a private trouble of cultural dysfunction brought
on by the (unsubstantiated claim of) intergenerational transmission
194 A. EMEJULU AND L. BASSEL
The origins of the 2008 economic crisis can be traced back to the liber-
alisation of finance since the 1980s. The current crisis ‘derives from the
long-term consequences of a cluster of financial innovations that aimed to
separate credit decisions from their subsequent risks by splitting them into
various components’ (Boyer 2012: 285). In other words, the creation of
synthetic financial instruments—the now infamous credit default swaps
and collateralised debt obligations—separated investors’ decision-making
from their associated risks and this fuelled ‘a private credit-led speculative
boom’ (ibid.: 285) which ultimately proved unsustainable once the key
manifestation of supposedly risk-free speculation—America’s sub-prime
mortgage market—went into freefall.
What is important in our analysis of the effects of the economic crisis
on minority women is the way in which the causes of the crisis and the
range of possible policy responses to the crisis have been subsequently
misrepresented by institutional actors and financial elites in both France
and Britain.
The policies of austerity—deficit reduction through tax increases and
cuts to public spending—are typically framed as the painful consequence
of out-of-control state spending rather than as the result of states’ rescu-
ing irresponsible financial institutions. Consequently, austerity has been
represented by a range of institutional actors—from the European Central
Bank to the International Monetary Fund to the European Commission—
as the only viable economic policy in order to get states’ ‘fiscal houses
in order’.2 As Clarke and Newman (2012: 300) argue, policymakers are
undertaking ‘intense ideological work’ to reframe how the public thinks
196 A. EMEJULU AND L. BASSEL
about the causes of the crisis and win the public’s ‘disaffected consent’ for
deeply unpopular austerity measures.
Britain is undergoing the most extensive reduction and restructuring of
its welfare state since the Second World War (Yeates et al. 2011; Taylor-
Gooby and Stoker 2010; Taylor-Gooby 2011; Whiteley et al. 2014). During
the five-year Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government from
2010 to 2015, £80 billion spending cuts were announced that included,
£18 billion reduction in welfare spending (Brewer and Browne 2011:
4). These spending cuts are ‘larger than any retrenchment since the
1920s’ (ibid.: 4). With the unexpected Conservative victory at the polls
in May 2015, the then Prime Minister David Cameron and the former
Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced a further £12
billion reduction in social welfare spending.3 The Scottish National Party
Government at Holyrood opposes the Westminster austerity programme
and has an official policy of mitigating its impact in Scotland. Under the
current devolution settlement, however, the Scottish Government is
obliged to implement these drastic spending cuts.
Whilst France is not implementing stringent austerity measures in com-
parison to Britain, a key aim of the Parti Socialiste government is defi-
cit reduction and cuts to public spending. François Hollande’s troubled
government missed a 2013 budget commitment to cut the deficit to 3%
of GDP and his controversial revenue generation plans of a 75% ‘super-
tax’ on households with incomes over €1million and a new 45% tax for
households with incomes over €150,000 is currently under judicial review
(L’Express 28/9/12). The Socialist government is not opting for sweeping
cuts but instead, at the time of writing is making reductions via a freeze on
all government spending which amounts to an estimated €10 billion cut
in public spending. However, under further pressure from the European
Central Bank, Hollande is planning to extend austerity measures further.
What do the austerity regimes in France and Britain mean for minority
women? Under austerity, minority women are disproportionately disad-
vantaged due to their already existing precarity, as we discussed above,
which is compounded by their particular relationships with the social wel-
fare state. Minority women are more likely to be employed in the feminised
professions of the public sector (as teachers, nurses and social workers,
etc.), more likely to be sub-contracted to the state via private sector organ-
isations (as care workers, cleaners, caterers, etc.) and are also more likely
to use public services which are at risk of being cut or privatised because
of gendered caring responsibilities (such as libraries, afterschool childcare,
WHOSE CRISIS COUNTS? MINORITY WOMEN, AUSTERITY AND ACTIVISM... 197
We’ve got a lot of stuff we have to do. Like the kids’ breakfast and stuff,
it’s mainly us women that are doing it. Bringing and dropping them off at
schools, even at the mosque, that’s mainly women that’s doing that. So it
[cuts to services] does [have an impact], it quite tires a woman out. When
it comes to the weekend when you want to spend time with the kids more,
you’re more reluctant, [you want] to be staying in bed.
198 A. EMEJULU AND L. BASSEL
A Black activist in England observes that the cuts are having a detrimental
effect on minority women’s activism:
If you’ve got a family, you’re a single parent, you’re a black woman who is
probably working two jobs [with] unsociable shifts, you’ve got tyrant-type
bosses who if you’re one minute late they’re ready to sack you and you’re
not in secure employment where they can just sack you and get you of the
door and get somebody in the next day, then you really haven’t got time and
you’re probably too tired to get up and start campaigning around things.
Having said that, I’ve also seen Black women who were not activists before
now involved because of how high the stakes are against us, stacked up
against us, and what we’re encountering, that it’s forced them to become
active, so there’s that aspect of it as well.
One thing that’s certain is that the prism of foreign women [as] victims
of violence. We’re able to have more of an impact with politicians because
no one supports violence. So it’s an angle of attack that’s interesting [and]
useful.
This advocate has been able to successfully lobby civil servants, party offi-
cials and elected members in both the current Parti Socialiste (PS) and
former Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) governments to speak
about minority women’s precarity and domestic violence. Victimhood,
therefore, provides an opportunity for some participants in our study to
make minority women visible and to mobilise support for them across the
political spectrum.
200 A. EMEJULU AND L. BASSEL
A more of a level playing field [with the state]. It’s somebody commission-
ing a service and it’s somebody providing a service…The balance of power
in that is always really interesting…They’re [minority women and the state]
more business partners than they are donor and recipient and that is an
angle we would definitely like to try.
We’re shifting towards more enterprise oriented activities rather than just
grants…Grant funding isn’t the way the future’s going and self-generation
of funding is important…It’s helped communities experiencing poverty set
up their own enterprises and to get a toe-hold in the market system.
The issue here is about the disconnect between minority women’s expe-
riences and analyses of their precarity and the type of projects and pro-
grammes offered by neoliberal third sector organisations. Particularly in
Scotland, we found that minority women activists were not being listened
to and their views about the meaning and purpose of their activism was
misrecognised by many of their third sector advocates.
In England, however, we found a different process at play regarding
the space that is created for minority women’s activism by enterprising
third sector organisations. It seems that some minority women are able
to use social enterprises as a tool for advocacy and activism. In England, a
migrant woman chose to establish a social enterprise because she perceived
it to be a less bureaucratic and more responsive space for intervention.
Being a social enterprise, she argues:
Gives me the independence that I need. We need to earn our money through
the expertise we deliver…and [we] then [get] to decide [how] to spend the
money on the services that we feel are needed. So it gives me that indepen-
dence, not only that, although I have an advisory role I make the decisions
so it gives [organisation’s name] power to decide on its own.
I would question whether, at the end of the day, their [third sector workers]
interest is in what’s the benefit of their service users or is it in the interest
of the people in their organization…I’m the same. I had this idea for the
cooking and the cleaning [service] but I never spoke to any women [with
whom she works] about it. I just thought what skills have the women got,
where they haven’t got high literacy or numeracy levels. They haven’t got
high levels of qualifications. But they can bloody cook.
From the perspective of black women who perhaps are political, who do
want to campaign…if they look at the face of the anti-cuts movement and
see it’s quite male-dominated that may put them off getting involved, it may
not give them the confidence to get involved and just because it’s an anti-
cuts movement doesn’t mean to say there’s not racism within it.
You have to explain it [racial and gender justice] and spell it out to them.
Now these are supposed to be people that are supposed to understand the
history… about the context, about what true equality means… but the real-
ity is they don’t really understand it because otherwise you wouldn’t have to
remind them over and over again, and you wouldn’t have to spell it out, so
it is quite a struggle, it’s quite tough.
Ethnic minority groups [are] trying to drive in their humble way different
causes, but how do you link with the local people, the indigenous people?
It’s almost impossible…You don’t seem to find an avenue to join in when
people are doing their thing, so you somehow find yourself on the sidelines
204 A. EMEJULU AND L. BASSEL
all the time. Even if you did your thing, you won’t be able to attract them
[white Scots] to come with you [because] it’s so segregated.
Conclusions
In this chapter, we have examined how the hegemonic framings of the
2008 economic crisis and subsequent austerity measures fail to capture,
explain and legitimate the invisible crises of minority women in Scotland,
England and France. We have demonstrated how minority women are
normatively absent in policy discussions about social and economic
inequality but are pathologically present when the social order is dis-
rupted as a result of these inequalities. Austerity measures cut minority
women’s already meagre social protections whilst simultaneously recast-
ing them as victims of racialised and patriarchal violence and/or as enter-
prising actors who should harness the power of capitalism to combat
their own poverty.
Centring the lived experiences of minority women is radical politics
because, as we have demonstrated throughout this chapter, their experi-
ences are misrecognised and/or erased in both European policymaking
and in civil society spaces and movements. Insisting on lived experience
recuperates and makes minority women visible political actors in a context
WHOSE CRISIS COUNTS? MINORITY WOMEN, AUSTERITY AND ACTIVISM... 205
Notes
1. The French third sector is composed of three types of organisations:
cooperatives, mutuals and associations. Cooperatives and mutuals
are quasi-market organisations whilst associations are distinguished
by traditionally providing social services for those groups poorly
served by the centralised welfare state: the long-term unemployed,
undocumented migrants, women with experiences of domestic vio-
lence, and so on (Chanial and Laville 2004). We only included asso-
ciations in our study.
2. Because of the weak economic recoveries of the Eurozone, the so-
called Troika has been forced to rethink its austerity policies.
3. Given the surprise Brexit vote and the resignation of David Cameron
and the sacking of George Osborne, by the new prime minister,
Theresa May, the future of austerity measures is unclear at the time
of writing.
4. The concept of social entrepreneurship, marketised solutions to
social problems, has gone hand in hand with neoliberal policies tak-
ing hold in Britain since the 1990s (see: Emejulu 2015).
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CHAPTER 10
Emanuela Lombardo
Introduction
The Spanish gender regime in the first decade of the 2000s has experi-
enced progress towards a more public rather than domestic type. How are
the European Union (EU) and the Spanish government austerity politics
reconfiguring the gender regime in Spain? And what is the role of femi-
nist struggles in resisting shifts towards inequality in the gender regime?
This chapter analyses the political dimension of the 2008 economic crisis
in Spain by analysing: (a) changes that austerity politics produces in the
Spanish equality machinery, gender equality, and care and employment
policies; (b) the role of the EU in national policy changes, that is the
Europeanization of Spanish gender policies in times of crisis; and (c) femi-
nist and civil society struggles against austerity politics.
The interest in studying Spain is due to the fact that before the crisis
the country showed positive developments in its gender equality policies
and gender regime, especially during the socialist government of Zapatero
from 2004 to 2010 (Bustelo 2016; Valiente 2013; Calvo and Martín
2009). Although Spanish women still perform much of the unpaid care
E. Lombardo (*)
Department of Political Science and Administration 2, Faculty of Political
Science and Sociology, Madrid Complutense University, Spain
unequal form of gender relations that they produce. The main difference,
according to Walby (2009), is between ‘domestic’ and ‘public’ gender
regimes. The domestic form tends to confine women to the sphere of
the household and exclude them from access to employment and political
representation. Domestic gender regimes present few women in waged
labour as compared to men, a heavy burden of unpaid work of care for
women, high percentages of men’s political representation compared to
low women’s percentages, and more difficult access to legal abortion.
In public gender regimes, women are more present in the public sphere
of employment and politics and have an easier access to legal abortion,
but they tend to be segregated in less influential and powerful positions.
Indicators of gender regimes include women in the workforce, gendered
inequality in employment, strength of equality legislation—to which I also
add the strength of equality institutions, public childcare provision for
children under three, women in Parliament, and legality of abortion.
The Spanish gender regime, according to Walby (2009), is in the middle of
a continuum between a domestic and a public gender regime, though closer
to a public regime. Although familialism and a traditional gender division of
work have maintained a heavy burden of unpaid care work in the hands of
Spanish women, women’s employment rates have continuously increased
from the 1980s, reaching a peak of 54.7 per cent in 2007, immediately
before the crisis (Statistical Office of the European Communities 2012).
However, women’s rates have always been lower than those of men (76.2
per cent in 2007), and of women in other EU member states (Peterson
2011; Statistical Office of the European Communities 2012). Moreover, the
quality of women’s jobs has also tended to be limited to fixed-term employ-
ment contracts for short periods, a prevalence of part-time jobs (80 per cent
in 2008, Lahey and de Villota 2013), while a high proportion of women’s
work is performed in the informal economy and thus not counted in official
statistics (Peterson 2011). Unemployment rates before the crisis also show a
difference between women and men, with 10.7 per cent women and 6.4 per
cent men (Statistical Office of the European Communities 2007).
The shift towards a public gender regime in Spain can be seen in the
stabilization of women’s political representation in national parliaments
from the 2004 elections around 36 per cent, with lower rates in the Senate
(IPU 2012). Zapatero’s socialist cabinets introduced parity governments
for the first time, with 50 per cent female ministers both in 2004 and
2008 (Bustelo 2016; Valiente 2013). Civil society’s struggles are key
for understanding changes in the gender regime, in particular feminist
212 E. LOMBARDO
Welfare State
The Spanish welfare state is a hybrid of conservative-familialist and social-
democratic features (Guillén and León 2011: 306). While health and edu-
cation until the crisis were universal rights, gender inequalities have been
maintained in a system characterized by familialism, reliance on women’s
unpaid work (93 per cent of women dedicate time to household and family
activities, as compared to men’s 70 per cent, INE 2007), and greater social
protection for those in paid work (Peterson 2011). Spain’s welfare state is
based on a traditional division of gender roles, as the unequal system of
parental leave regulations shows (Ciccia and Verloo 2012). While maternity
leave regulations grant mothers six mandatory and not transferable weeks
(ten can be transferred to the father, but there are no incentives for it, so
that traditional gender norms tend to prevent fathers from taking the leave),
fathers only enjoy two weeks of paternity leave. This ‘female caregiver model’
and ‘male breadwinner model’ of social policies, together with Spanish inad-
equate provision of welfare services, make it difficult for women to be freed
from the work of care and engage in paid work (Ciccia and Verloo 2012).
with the creation, within the Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs,
of a higher rank (than the WI) Equality Policies General Secretariat in
2004, and the establishment of a higher rank Ministry of Equality in 2008
(Bustelo and Lombardo 2012).
The colour of the party in government has been particularly relevant at
the Spanish national level, as the development of gender equality policies
during the socialist government of Zapatero shows, with the adoption of
important laws against gender violence (Law 1/2004), allowing same-
sex marriage (Law 13/2005), promoting public care for dependent peo-
ple (Law 39/2006), and also gender equality in employment and other
areas (Law 3/2007) (Bustelo 2016). Steps towards a more equal sharing
of gender roles in care were taken through the Equality Law 3/2007
that introduced an individual right to two weeks of paternity leave. An
extension of paternity leave to four weeks had been planned through Law
9/2009 that was to be enforced in January 2011. Abortion rights were
extended in the second term of Zapatero through the adoption of law
2/2010 that granted women the autonomy to decide freely until the 14th
week of pregnancy, and until 22nd week in case of serious risks for the
health and life of women or serious anomalies of the embryo.
The influence of the autonomous feminist movement in Spain’s gender
equality machinery and policies has historically been rather limited (Bustelo
2016; Bustelo and Ortbals 2007; Valiente 2003). In this respect Clavero
(2015: 139) argues that women’s interests in Spanish politics ‘have been
more successfully organized and represented by trade unions and political
parties than by women’s civil society organisations’. However, in the issues
of gender violence and abortion, feminist mobilizations have been crucial
to policy progress (Bustelo 2016).
service markets, at all levels of government’, and ‘to reduce the adminis-
trative burden for enterprises’ (Council of the European Union 2011: 4).
Finally, the EU pushes Spain to reform the pension system, by extending
the statutory retirement age and increasing the number of working years
for the calculation of pensions (Council of the European Union 2011),
and to reform the tax system in the name of ‘efficiency’, by increasing
‘more growth-friendly indirect taxes’ (Council of the European Union
2012: 8).
The analysis of the 2011 and 2012 Council Recommendations to Spain,
and the studies of 2011 National Reform Programmes in the EU-27 con-
ducted by Bettio et al. (2012: 164, 97–98) and Villa and Smith (2011)
show that gender has not been mainstreamed in the design of policy
responses to the crisis in Spain, which might help to understand the detri-
mental consequences of these measures for gender regimes. Indeed there
is no intention in either of the Council documents on the need to assess
the impact of measures of fiscal consolidation from a gender perspective
and to ensure gender equity when planning the reforms to respond to the
crisis. Yet, a gender-sensitive analysis of EU recommendations on how
Spain should reform its labour market or tax system—which was not per-
formed—would put efficiency in relation to equity and would assess who
would benefit or suffer more from the consequences of the recommended
reforms. The response of the Spanish government to the Council recom-
mendations is its National Reform Programme of 2013, which follows
these recommendations by proposing an agenda of further austerity and
liberalization measures, such as cuts in welfare policies, tax increases, lib-
eralizations, and privatizations of public services.
was savings in administrative costs within the context of the fiscal austerity
demanded by the current economic crisis’ (Bettio et al. 2012: 114). At the
regional level, the downgrading or elimination of equality institutions has
taken place in Galicia, Murcia, and Madrid (Paleo and Alonso 2015). At
the local level, Law 27/2013 of ‘rationalization and sustainability of local
administration’ has eliminated article 28 of Law 7/1985 that granted local
government competence to realize activities for the promotion of women.
Feminist organizations, in their 2008–2013 UN Shadow Report, strongly
criticized both the budget cuts in equality policies and the restructuring of
the equality machinery at the central and regional levels.8
indemnity (within the first 12 weeks and only if the crime was reported).
No free right of abortion for a woman within a set period would be
allowed. Rather, the bill put forward a long series of obstacles that would
make it almost impossible for a woman to have an abortion.
The feminist movement strongly mobilized against what it renamed a
‘counter-reformist’ bill, by organizing huge demonstrations, reactivating
platforms such as the National Platform of Feminist Organizations, and
forging national and international alliances (Alonso 2015; García 2015,
2014). The struggle to defend the right of abortion was a success story for
the feminist movement. Massive national and transnational feminist mobi-
lizations with ‘freedom trains’ converging on Madrid,10 criticism from
feminist members of the European Parliament, internal divergences within
the conservative party, and the government’s fear that the bill would have
a boomerang effect against the ruling party in the year preceding elec-
tions, led the prime minister to withdraw the bill, and forced the resigna-
tion of the minister of justice that proposed it.11 The campaign revitalized
the feminist movement and attracted more young women to the feminist
cause (Alonso 2015).
While the withdrawal of the restrictive abortion bill indicates that the
gender regime is not currently receding to a domestic form in this respect,
the struggle is not over for feminists. The Constitutional Court still needs
to dictate a sentence on the 2/2010 abortion law by former socialist gov-
ernment that the Popular Party contested in the courts, and the case is
in the hands of a pro-life judge. In September 2015, the conservative
government adopted a reform of the current abortion law making it more
restrictive of the rights of young women under 18 who will need to obtain
their parents’ consent to have an abortion. Moreover, at the regional level,
legal incremental changes are taking place that might eventually result in
the restriction of abortion rights. Along the same ideological line as the
withdrawn abortion bill, six Autonomous Communities governed by the
Popular Party have approved laws for the protection of pregnant women
that protect women as mothers, providing financial means for pregnant
women in difficult economic situations to continue their pregnancy, but
not to interrupt it, and whose aim is to guarantee the embryo’s right to
life (Paleo and Alonso 2015). These laws show a pro-life approach that
limits women’s right to self-determination. They also indicate that of the
few economic resources that will be dedicated to gender equality policies,
most of them will go to women as mothers, whereas women who are in
difficult economic situations but are not mothers will not benefit from
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST STRUGGLES IN SPAIN: RECONFIGURING... 223
dadanas), such as the ‘white wave’ to defend public health, the ‘green
wave’ to defend public education, or the feminist ‘purple wave’ that
mainstreams gender in the anti-austerity struggles, show that a growing
part of Spanish society is actively defending its welfare and equality rights.
These movements have blocked the privatization of public hospitals and
the eviction of families from their homes. The Indignados movement,
born on 15 May 2011, in the same year that similar social movements
were emerging in other countries (such as Occupy Wall Street in the
US), initiated the protest against the economic crisis and the deteriorat-
ing quality of Spanish democracy (Cruells and Ybarra 2013). Though
a heterogeneous social movement that includes intersecting economic,
environmental, feminist, and other struggles, it is nevertheless united by
a discourse that challenges political corruption and austerity measures
(Cruells and Ruiz 2014; Calvo 2013). Feminists have been active in the
Indignados and the ‘waves’ struggles, forging alliances with different civil
society projects, and in some cases leading important platforms. This
was the case with Ada Colau, leader of the Platform of people affected by
housing evictions, who would be elected mayor of Barcelona in the 2015
municipal elections.
The government’s undemocratic reaction to the civil society struggles
has been a restriction of freedom of expression and other human rights
through the 2014 ‘Law of citizens’ safety’, which civil society has strongly
opposed, renaming it the ‘Gag law’.14 The political scenario is continu-
ously changing, however, with the emergence of the populist left-wing
Podemos party and the victory of civic lists in the 2015 local and regional
elections, which led to the election of female leftist mayors in Madrid and
Barcelona. These new political actors, by opening institutional channels to
represent some of the Indignados movement demands (Calvo and Álvarez
2015), could alter the agenda of austerity and civil rights restrictions.
Conclusions
Austerity politics in response to the economic crisis adopted in the EU
and Spain is promoting a shift in the Spanish gender regime towards a
more neoliberal public form, but so far not a regression towards a more
domestic gender regime in Walby’s (2009) terms. Shifts towards a neo-
liberal public form of gender regime can be detected in neoliberal labour
reforms, privatizations, deterioration of the quality of employment, job
precariousness, growing inequality of the Spanish labour market, retrench-
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST STRUGGLES IN SPAIN: RECONFIGURING... 225
Notes
1. See UGT trade union’s 2015 report http://www.ugt.es/
Publicaciones/INFORME_UGT_SOBRE_IGUALDAD_
SALARIAL_2015.pdf (accessed 01/09/2016).
2. See national statistical office http://www.ine.es/ (accessed
01/09/2016).
3. See Carmen Bravo, from Trade Union CCOO, at http://www.ter-
cerainformacion.es/spip.php?article34661 (accessed 01/09/2016).
4. See El País 2/12/2012 ‘Disabled help cry against the govern-
ment’s cuts’.
5. See http://impactodegeneroya.blogia.com/ (accessed 01/09/2016).
6. El País, 24 November 2012.
7. See RD 200/2012 of 23 January 2012, RD 1823/2011 of 21
December 2011, and RD 1887/2011 of 30 December 2011.
8. See https://cedawsombraesp.wordpress.com/ (accessed
01/09/2016).
9. See petition at https://www.change.org/p/salvemos-los-centros-
de-la-mujer-de-castilla-la-mancha (accessed 01/09/2016).
10. See http://www.eltrendelalibertad.com/ and http://eltrendelal-
ibertadfilm.blogspot.com.es/ (accessed 01/09/2016).
11. El País 24/9/2014 ‘The abortion law, story of a failure’.
12. See https://cedawsombraesp.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/
nota-de-prensa-la-onu-suspende-a-espana-en-igualdad-de-
genero/ (accessed 01/09/2016).
13. During the crisis a great number of Spanish people, especially
poorer families, were evicted from their homes because the mort-
gage law in Spain does not include a debt relief even after foreclo-
sure and eviction. The Court of Justice of the European Union in
its sentence of 14 March 2013 on the so-called Aziz case con-
demned the Spanish enforcement system of foreclosure due to the
breach of consumers’ rights it causes.
14. See survey conducted by Metroscopia for Avaaz.org http://noso-
mosdelito.net/sites/default/files/public_files/documentos/
encuesta_ley_de_seguridad_ciudadana_1_1_1.pdf (accessed
01/09/2016).
15. However, women’s autonomy is still under attack because young
women’s rights have been restricted, the Constitutional Court
needs to give a sentence on the 2010 progressive abortion law, and
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST STRUGGLES IN SPAIN: RECONFIGURING... 227
laws that protect the embryo have been adopted at the regional
level.
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Modernities. London: Sage.
CHAPTER 11
Anna Elomäki and Johanna Kantola
Introduction
Finland represents a latecomer to the economic crisis in Europe. The “sus-
tainability gap” of public finances began to figure visibly in the politi-
cal debate in 2013. The new conservative-right government in Finland
significantly intensified economic austerity politics with its government
programme and measures to implement it in May 2015. Government’s
austerity programme involved immediate spending cuts, significant
structural reforms and an ultimatum that unless labour market organiza-
tions agree to reduce the cost of work to increase the competitiveness of
businesses and cut public expenses, additional spending cuts will be made.
The highly gendered austerity measures and competitiveness policies have
been complemented with the disappearance of gender equality from the
political agenda. With the populist right party The Finns in the govern-
ment and the refugee crisis in Europe, the austerity politics is combined
with a harsh anti-immigration policy. We suggest that the three governing
parties represent—in often competing and contradictory ways—neoliber-
alism, conservatism and racism with detrimental consequences to gender
equality and gender equality policies.
In this chapter, our aim is to analyse feminist resistance to the gendered
and racialized austerity politics in Finland. Feminist resistance elsewhere has
revitalized politics in new social movements, bringing the gendered and
racialized consequences of the crisis to the attention of international actors
such as CEDAW and creating and curbing the spaces for marginalized femi-
nist groups such as those of racial and ethnic minorities (Bassel and Emejulu
2014 and 2017; Lombardo in this book). Finland has a relatively weak
feminist movement that has relied on institutionalized cross-party collabo-
ration between women’s organizations and close relationships with the state
(Kantola 2006). Thereby it forms a particular case for studying the role of
such a state-centred and consensus-oriented form of feminist activism at
times of austerity politics that challenge the prevailing gender regime that
the activism has relied upon. The feminist resistance to austerity politics
addressed in this study brings to light the political—that is conflictual—
dimension of austerity politics, in opposition to the more technical neolib-
eral framing of the crisis that the Finnish government has put forward.
We ask whether austerity and the political climate shaped by neolib-
eralism, conservatism and racism constitute a turning point for Finnish
feminism. We analyse the responses of established women’s organizations
and trade unions as well as new feminist initiatives that have emerged in
response to the government’s neoliberal and conservative agenda. How
have different feminist actors reacted to austerity and competitiveness pol-
icies and with what effects? How have they understood austerity and the
reasons behind it, which arguments have they used to criticize or reject it?
We are particularly interested in what differentiates the new feminist initia-
tives from established women’s organizations and study the old alliances
and new formations to explore the kinds of political activism that become
possible in times of crisis.
Our research material consists of documents, statements and social
media commentaries that women’s and feminist organizations and other
actors, such as the trade unions, have issued in relation to gender equal-
ity and austerity politics in 2015–2016. This research material has been
complemented with two semi-structured interviews with key actors in
the feminist movements (see Research Material listed at the end of this
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN FINLAND... 233
Evans argues that in the UK and the USA, ‘whilst neoliberalism has pro-
vided a difficult context for mobilising effective collective resistance, femi-
nist movements have nonetheless managed it without needing to rebrand’
(Evans 2015: 60). This points to the elasticity and relevance of feminist
forms of organizing. Indeed, Evans suggests, feminist activism flourishes
exactly because of the economic and democratic crises.
In this chapter, we focus upon a political and economic moment in
Finland when the state has turned its back on gender equality. We argue
that Finnish austerity policy is based on the ideologies of neoliberalism,
conservatism and anti-immigration bordering racism. Neoliberalism has
signified reducing the role of the welfare state and increasing the role of
the market in all service production. It is a longer trend intensified under
the current conservative-right government (for an overview see Elomäki
et al. 2016a). The necessity of austerity became the main frame of political
debate during the parliamentary elections of spring 2015. The terms of
the debate were set by an assessment of the Ministry of Finance that the
level of “sustainability gap” was at 10 billion euro and that “adjustments”
should be made entirely through cuts instead of through increasing taxes.
Parties across the political spectrum accepted that “adjustments”, includ-
ing spending cuts, were needed. After the conservative Central Party won
the elections, the party leader Juha Sipilä—former businessman and a
newcomer to politics—made the state of public finances the key issue of
government negotiations. All other priorities and values were subjected to
the “10 billion challenge” and the need to put an end to the increasing
public debt (see also Elomäki et al. 2016a). The chosen coalition part-
ners, economic liberal Coalition Party and the populist the Finns, shared
this vision. The programme of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government,
adopted on 27 May 2015, proposed immediate 4 billion euro cuts in pub-
lic spending and significant structural reforms aiming at another 4 billion
of savings. Critical commentators argued that the spending cuts, which
weakened the services and benefits of the woman-friendly welfare state
built in the 1980s and 1990, were bound to worsen women’s position
in the labour market, shift responsibility for care of children and elderly
from the public sector to the families—that is, women—and either cause
a turn from a dual earner model to a male-breadwinner society or increase
women’s double burden (Professorien… 2015).
Such neoliberalism has also signified a crisis of democratic debate and
forms of participation. Already the previous government had worked hard
to raise public awareness about the ‘crisis’ and to create the right atmo-
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN FINLAND... 235
New feminist initiatives have emerged to fill the void left by established
women’s movements’ slow and watered-down reaction to austerity.
Feminist researchers and activists—us included—were frustrated by the
government’s neglect of gender equality and the gendered austerity mea-
sures as well as with the weak reaction of the established movement. The
new feminist initiatives launched in response to Sipilä’s government and
the broad context constituted by neoliberalism, conservatism and racism
differ from established movements in terms of their ways of organizing
and practices and have challenged their position as the primary advocates
and commentators on gender equality. The most visible new initiatives
were a preliminary gender impact assessment of the government pro-
gramme signed by almost 90 professors and specialized researchers, and a
new, open citizen’s movement for gender equality TASAN!.
The preliminary gender impact assessment signed by well-known aca-
demics (Professorien… 2015) turned into a media event that brought the
gender impacts of austerity into public and political debate and forced
politicians to react. Based on the preliminary analysis, the professors
required an in-depth gender impact assessment of the proposed cuts and
reforms and the cancelling of plans that have a negative impact on gender
equality, as well as for a new government gender equality action plan. The
professors did not take a clear anti-austerity stance or expose the neo-
liberal and conservative undertones of the government’s proposals, but
they exposed the systematic and cumulative gender bias of the proposed
measures. The main conclusion was that the government’s proposals that
transfer responsibility for care from the society to individuals and families
and weaken women’s labour market position may lead to a return to a
male-breadwinner society. We were ourselves, together with two other
colleagues, behind this initiative that took the neutral and objective posi-
tion of academic expertise and relied on the prestige of well-known aca-
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN FINLAND... 243
the idea for NYTKIS and the Finnish Gender Studies Association, which
declined the idea. Behind the creation of HelFem was frustration with
the established organizations “who have all the power and do nothing”
(Interview 2). The network of feminists of the Parliament was created in
order to provide a more active and ideologically unified platform than the
long-standing network of women MPs, which was instrumental in push-
ing through gender equality reforms in the 1990s, but has become more
conservative due to the diminishing consensus on gender equality issues.
The new initiatives have challenged the monopoly of established women’s
organizations as the main advocates and exchange partners in matters of
gender equality. Researchers’ initiatives and TASAN! have been visible in
the media, and their representatives have met with decision-makers.
Although many of the new initiatives share with established orga-
nizations the goal to influence policy and public debate, their ways of
organizing and practices differ. The new initiatives do not have heavy
organizational structures, such as boards, annual meetings and statutes,
which guarantee the legitimacy of the established organizations but make
individuals’ participation and fast reactions difficult. For example, TASAN!
explicitly encourages individuals to take part in shaping the campaign and
organizing activities. One does not have to become a member to partici-
pate, and decisions are made in open internet-based working groups and
regular meetings open for everyone, not in closed meetings of an elected
board. Unlike established organizations, the new initiatives do not search
legitimacy through claims of representativeness, and they do not attempt
to speak in the name of “women”. The professors who participated in
the gender impact assessment initiative only represented themselves, and
TASAN! reminds that its activities and views are the sum of the individuals
who take part in formulating them. While both initiatives have individual-
ized features, they are, nevertheless, results of collective feminist action.
The new initiatives have taken a more proactive and imaginative approach
to communication than established organizations. The researchers’ initia-
tive effectively used mainstream media to deliver its message. The profes-
sors’ claims and demands were made public through the main national
newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, which published an article “Tens of profes-
sors criticize the government: women pay the savings” on 11 June 2015
(Kauhanen 2015). The story was picked up by all main newspapers and
many radio and TV channels and shared in social media more than 15,000
times. A key factor in this success was the reliance on the prestige of indi-
viduals, which is a relatively new strategy in feminist activism in Finland.
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN FINLAND... 245
The media coverage reveals the importance of this approach: the number
of the signatories and their status gained more attention than the content
of their criticism. The news coverage focused on the conflict between con-
cerned professors and ignorant government, not between the government
and the women who were to pay the bill (Elomäki et al. 2016a).
A distinctive feature of TASAN! is the playful and imaginative approach
to campaigning. The name of the campaign is a pun, and its slogan “but
we are like two berries”, which draws on the Finnish simile to the English
“like two peas in the pod”, shows that it does not take itself too seriously.
According to TASAN!-activists, the rhetoric and thematic choices of the
campaign are conscious efforts to ensure that decision-makers and the
wider audience hear the message. By packaging the message about gender
equality differently than established women’s organizations, TASAN! may
reach people who normally shut their ears. The different approach may
also encourage new actors to join a feminist cause.
Apart from Unioni that mainly communicates through social media,
the established women’s organizations have not made full use of the pos-
sibilities of social media. TASAN!, in contrast, operates mainly through
social media and has more followers than NYTKIS and NJKL. Social
media has been a crucial part of the feminist response to austerity also
in terms of the memes that criticize the government. One of the most
popular of these was a picture of the three male government leaders with
the caption “Men who hate women”, the Finnish title of the first book
of Stig Larsson’s popular Millennium crime novel series. This and other
references to misogyny in feminist reactions to austerity are connected
to the broader political context, where the increasingly open racism in
Finland has been paired with misogyny (Keskinen 2013). The memes have
drawn the attention of the wider public more effectively than the positions
of established organizations and they have also shaped the media debate.
For example, the TV channel MTV3 published on its website a story on
the competitiveness package with the headline: “Cuts cause anger in social
media”: “Men who hate low-paid women” (MTV3 9.9.2015).
In sum, the new feminist initiatives that have filled the void left by the
invisibility of established women’s organization have been able to react
faster and reach public, media and even decision-makers more effectively,
due to their less-hierarchical ways of organizing and new ways of commu-
nication. Despite their relative success as forms of feminist resistance, how-
ever, the most visible of these new initiatives—researchers’ gender impact
assessment initiative and TASAN!—are both embedded in the neoliberal-
246 A. ELOMÄKI AND J. KANTOLA
ization of public policy and deploy strategies and discourses that draw on
those of the government. The researchers’ initiative takes advantage of the
increasing reliance on evidence-based policy making that has been seen as
part of the expansion of neoliberal governance in public policy. By speak-
ing through the expert position and relying on research-based evidence,
the initiative makes use of the government’s own rhetoric of knowledge-
based leadership and effectiveness. TASAN! has packaged gender equality
in a manner that builds on the nationalist rhetoric of the government and
its competitiveness-agenda, which is partly to blame for gender equality
getting sidelined in the first place. It seems, that the critique and alterna-
tives proposed by the two initiatives remain entangled within the govern-
ment’s neoliberal agenda: the former embraces aspects of its approach to
governance, the other reiterates its competitiveness-agenda.
power in labour market policies and beyond. Debates about the demise
of this power have been taking place for over a decade now (see Saari and
Kantola 2016). There is a strong public discourse about the backwardness
and old-fashioned character of the trade unions in particular, where they
are constructed as attached to defending a past of welfare benefits that is
no longer economically sustainable (Mannevuo 2015). Paradoxically the
government’s austerity politics came to rely on the successes and negotiat-
ing skills of the corporatist actors.
The record of the trade unions remains as mixed as its past in advanc-
ing gender equality (Kainulainen and Saari 2014; Saari 2016; Saari and
Kantola 2016; Savtchenko 2015). The central organizations have gender
equality policies and working groups, and participate in drafting govern-
ment policies and law that pertain to gender equality and the labour mar-
ket. However, many of the good practices remain non-implemented and
the decision-making structures male dominated and the culture masculine.
In relation to feminist resistance and austerity politics, we discern three
trends, where, first, the trade unions have come to the defence of the
‘low paid women workers in the public sector’. Second, the unions have
continued to negotiate and make deals in all-male panels about issues that
are highly gendered and impact on women’s labour market participation.
Third, the government failure to take an active stance on gender equal-
ity has opened a critical space for the trade unions to develop their own
gender policy agendas, for example in relations to reforming the parental
leave system.
First, the low-paid women—especially in the public but also in the
private sector—were a central figure in the demonstrations and public
statements by union leaders in the media. In addition to mass demon-
strations against the government’s austerity politics, the national labour
confederations issued a very long and detailed joint statement on govern-
ment policies (SAK, STTK and Akava 2015).5 The figure of the low-paid
woman worker in the public sector played a central role in these joint
statement too (cf. Elomäki et al. 2016a). The unions pointed out the gen-
dered effects of the government policy and the fact that there was no gen-
der impact assessment of these policies (p. 1, p. 15). The gendered effects
included the burden that women—who in Finland characteristically work
full-time and not part-time as in many other European countries—would
bear of increasing the working hours in terms of reconciling work and
family due to their bigger care role (p. 15). Cutting the holiday pay, holi-
days and sick leave pay in the public sector would according to them hit
especially women as they are a majority among the public sector workers
248 A. ELOMÄKI AND J. KANTOLA
(p. 18).6 All of these cuts, the statement argues, have detrimental effects
on the gender pay gap (p. 19, p. 20).
Second, despite this strong discourse about gendered austerity poli-
tics, the masculine character of the corporatist negotiation process came
into play in the all-male negotiations that the labour market organiza-
tions (employer and employees’ unions) held for a contract to enhance
the country’s competitiveness (kilpailukykysopimus). The centre-right
government had pushed for the two parties to negotiate for a contract
that would reduce the costs of companies to employ workers and hence
create a competitive edge for the whole country. This could form an alter-
native to the harsh government austerity measures. The contract that was
reached and signed by the three parties includes a transfer of social insur-
ance payments from employers to employees, an increase in the work-
ing hours without compensation in pay (24 hours annually), 30 per cent
reduction in holiday pay for public sector workers (2017–2019), and a
freeze in all salaries for a year. The government, in turn, backed down on
some of its controversial austerity measures and promised tax reductions
to compensate for the transfer of social insurance payments from employ-
ers to workers. Commentators have noted that the contract is historical as
the workers agreed to worsen their contracts. Especially the trade union
PAM, which represents low-paid women in the service sector (so-called
pink-collar workers), came close to rejecting the contract, which, in turn,
would have destroyed it. PAM argued that the contract worsened signifi-
cantly the working and pay conditions of its female-dominated part-time
workers.
Third, the trade unions have also managed to make new openings in
gender equality policy at a political moment when the government is fail-
ing to do them (for the government failure see Elomäki et al. 2016a, b).
Two most prominent examples include SAK’s new model for parental leave
arrangements and Akava’s model for the social security of self-employed.
SAK’s model gathered positive comments from feminist politicians and
women’s movement organizations. Akava in turn, tried to highlight the
‘gender equality problems of highly educated women’ (Fjäder 28.2.2016).
Conclusions
Although austerity and the general political context of neoliberalism,
conservatism and racism are catastrophic for gender equality, they have
opened a space for a strong feminist discourse about inequality, racism
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN FINLAND... 249
been passed in the Parliament (e.g. weakening the quality and accessibil-
ity of childcare). What is interesting in terms of feminist resistance is that
when the government cancelled the planned cuts in Sunday and overtime
pay that would have hit low-paid, female-dominated professions, its head
was not turned by established women’s organizations, research-based
knowledge or trade unions, but individual experience. According to Prime
Minister Sipilä, the decision was influenced by a TV-interview where two
midwives explained how the cuts would effect their lives (Yle 28.9.2015).
One year after the coming into the power of the austerity government, in
June 2016, a meeting to establish a new Feminist Party was held in Helsinki.
The party filed its application for official registration in December 2016, after
gathering the required signatures of 5000 supporters. Whilst gaining inspira-
tion from its Swedish counterpart, the Feminist Initiative (F!) that gained
its first MEP in the European Parliamentary elections in 2014, the current
political and economic context of Finnish austerity politics has created a fer-
tile ground for such new forms of feminist resistance. The politics and the
impact of the Feminist Party in Finland remain to be seen and studied.
Notes
1. A proposal to share the costs of parenthood through a one-off pay-
ment paid to employers of mothers when mothers return to work
after parental leave was added to the competitiveness package in
September.
2. Kantola was an executive board member from 2008 to 2014 and
Elomäki from 2015 onwards. Both were representing the Finnish
Gender Studies Association.
3. The name of the campaign is an intended pun that is difficult to
translate. Literally it means equally/evenly distributed, but the word
can also be used to highlight the determinedness of the speaker or
the urgency of something. For example, “tasan nyt” means “right
now”.
4. Private email correspondence 12 June 2015.
5. SAK, STTK and Akava are the national labour confederations in
Finland. SAK is a confederation of 20 trade unions in industry, the
public sector, transport, private services, and cultural and journalis-
tic branches. It represents about 1 million members, 54 per cent
men and 46 per cent women. STTK represents salaried employees in
Finland and has a membership of about 550,000; 74 per cent of its
AUSTERITY POLITICS AND FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN FINLAND... 251
Research material
Fjäder, Sture. 2016. Tasa-arvo on vielä harhaa. Verkkouutiset, February 28.
http://www.verkkouutiset.me/tasa-arvo-on-viela-harhaa/. Accessed 2 June
2016
Interview 1, Secretary General of Naisasialiitto Unioni, 12 May 2016.
Interview 2, activist involved in Joukkovoimaa and Helfem, 12 May 2016.
Kauhanen, Anna-Liina. 2015. Kymmenet professorit arvostelevat rajusti hallitusta.
Naiset maksavat säästöt. Helsingin sanomat, June 11. http://www.hs.fi/koti-
maa/a1433910187625. Accessed 30 August 2016
Kokoomusnaiset. 2015a. Toivakka: Muistavatko “äijäfeministit” tasa-arvon myös
vaalien jälkeen?. April 12. http://kokoomusnaiset.fi/ajankohtaista/toivakka-
muistavatko-aijafeministit-tasa-arvon-myos-vaalien-jalkeen. Accessed 4 April
2015
———. 2015b. Kokoomuksen Sarkomaa: Sanoista tasa-arvotekoihin vanhem-
muuden kustannusten jakamisessa!. April 30. http://kokoomusnaiset.fi/
ajankohtaista/kokoomuksen-sarkomaa-sanoista-tasa-ar votekoihin-
vanhemmuuden-kustannusten-jakamisessa. Accessed 4 April 2015
Kvinnoförbundet. 2015. ”Feministiska perspektiv på ekonomin behövs, säger
Jungner-Nordgren och Ljungqvist” . Press release April 17, 2015. http://
www.kvinnoforbundet.fi/sve/jamstalldhetspolitik/article-17916-43148-
feministiska-perspektiv-pa-ekonomin-behovs-sager-jungnernordgren-och-ljun
gqvist?offset_17916=10&categories_17916=1808
MTV3. 9.9.2015. Leikkaukset närkästyttävät somessa: Miehet jotka vihaavat
pienipalkkaisia naisia. http://www.mtv.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/artikkeli/
leikkauspaatokset-kuohuttavat-somessa-miehet-jotka-vihaavat-pienipalkkaisia-
naisia/5303726. Accessed 30 August 2016
Naisjärjestöjen keskusliitto NJKL. 2015a. Hallitusohjelmatavoitteet 2015–2020.
http://www.naisjarjestot.fi/client/naisjarjestot/userfiles/njkl-hallitusohjelma
tavoitteet-2015-2019.pdf. Accessed 15 October 2015
———. 2015b. Naisjärjestöjen keskusliiton kevätkokouksen julkilausuma. April
22. http://naisjarjestot.fi/vaikuttaminen/kannanotot-ja-julkaisut/kannanoto
t/?newsid=196&newstitle=Naisjärjestöjen+Keskusliiton+kevätkokouksen+julk
ilausuma. Accessed 30 August 2016
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CHAPTER 12
Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo
J. Kantola (*)
Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of
Helsinki, Finland
E. Lombardo
Department of Political Science and Administration 2, Faculty of Political
Science and Sociology Madrid Complutense University, Spain
impact on women and men. Analysing gender and the crisis is the most
popular approach used by the chapters. The gender approaches enable
analysing the underlying deep societal structures of the crisis that lay in
capitalist and patriarchal power. A number of chapters draw on decon-
struction approaches by analysing how neoliberal solutions to the crisis are
constructed as hegemonic while other solutions are marginalized. They
destabilize gender essentialisms showing that the crisis can be constructed
in multiple gendered ways that have powerful effects on subjects.
Analysing the crisis through an intersectionality approach is central for
the whole book. The strength of intersectional approaches is to show the
interacting systems of domination that are at work in the crisis, produc-
ing differentiated impacts of austerity policies on, for example, migrant
minoritized women, and to advance more inclusive policies. Finally, as
we have suggested elsewhere (Kantola and Lombardo 2017a, b), post-
deconstruction approaches would contribute to the debate by relocating
attention to the material underpinnings of the neoliberal political econ-
omy that caused the crisis, and the emotions and affects that circulate dur-
ing this event and cement gendered and racialized inequalities. However,
despite their potential contributions, much like in gender and politics
debates in general, the approaches do not figure prominently in the chap-
ters of the book.
Feminist analyses of the politics of the crisis, from different approaches,
have much to say about institutional and policy changes, Europeanization
of gender equality and policies, and political struggles against austerity
and in defence of equality and democracy. The volume shows how the
economic crisis is deeply intertwined with a political one and how this
has gender and intersectional dimensions. Jointly, contributions in this
book address ‘the political’ dimension of the crisis. Since the political has
to do with the ‘distribution, exercise, and consequences of power’ (Hay
2002, 3), exploring the political dimension of the crisis in Europe from
gender and intersectional perspectives means addressing ‘power relations’
and their gender and intersectional dimensions (Kantola and Lombardo
2017a, b).
Political theory has addressed power from many different approaches.
Power has to do with conflict between political actors (Mouffe 2005;
Lukes 2005). State power involves domination and the use of coercion
(Weber 1919/1994), but also the shaping of consensus through cultural
hegemony (Gramsci 1971). Power produces subjects through discourses
and practices that shape people’s ways of thinking and behaving (Foucault
CONCLUSIONS: UNDERSTANDING GENDER AND THE POLITICS... 259
When asking what was gained and what was lost in terms of gender
equality institutions and policies, we see that some institutions have
persisted and resisted the downward spiralling trend in gender equality
policy. Whilst discrimination against young women in the labour market
has increased,1 the anti-discrimination law banning this is still there. At
the same time, there are less resources for implementing and monitor-
ing this legislation as gender equality ombudsmen, agencies and institu-
tions have been amalgamated with other state bodies as for example in
Ireland or Spain (see Wöhl and Lombardo respectively). There are also
less resources for women’s movements both at the EU and national levels
to hold governments and state agencies into account in relation to their
gender policies.
To explain the roots of these hard times for gender equality in the EU,
Weiner and MacRae employ feminist institutionalist theories to present
European integration as a male-dominated project whose neoliberal logic
of action is prioritized above the values of gender equality both prior to
and during the economic crisis. In their view, ‘the gender equality project
has never been able to dislodge the reigning neoliberally-informed rules
of the game’. In contrast to this understanding of power as domination,
Jacquot maps dynamics of both domination and empowerment in the
evolution of EU gender equality policies. Her analysis shows how the pol-
icy achievements of gender equality advocates during phases of empower-
ment were progressively dismantled in times of crisis due to shifts in the
policy instruments, the balance of power between EU institutions, the
gender advocate networks, and the prioritization of discourses of ‘rights’
and ‘economy’ over ‘gender equality’ and ‘social cohesion’.
The economic crisis represents a normatively and discursively challeng-
ing moment for gender advocates, different chapters argue. Women and
gender are made more invisible in post-crisis Parliamentary debates, argues
Prata in the case of Portugal. Cavaghan suggests that feminist activists lack
economic expertise which would enable them to actively and confidently
engage in macroeconomic policy discussions at the EU level. Elomäki and
Kantola illustrate how this is the case with the traditional women’s orga-
nizations in Finland who have difficulties in engaging with the economic
austerity discourse. By contrast, Lombardo shows that feminist actors in
Spain have actively taken part in collective anti-austerity struggles against
the government’s economic discourses and policies.
There is particular scholarly, activist, and political disappointment in
the lack of gender mainstreaming of the austerity politics. This is the focus
CONCLUSIONS: UNDERSTANDING GENDER AND THE POLITICS... 261
that gender equality has been achieved in the country, which discour-
aged the development of policies to achieve gender equality, especially
in harder times of austerity. In Poland, a supposedly ‘family-friendly’ and
‘gender-neutrally framed’ measure that allowed workers to reduce work-
ing hours to care for a child under three years, was dynamited by a parallel
anti-crisis measure that allowed employers to extend work hours without
the need for overtime compensation, resulting in the reproduction of tra-
ditional gender patterns of work and care. Zbyszewska argues that the
Polish policy response in terms of work-life reconciliation was definitely
Europeanized, but the shift from a public to a privatized care, that put
the welfare responsibility on families and individuals, was based on an EU
model of development that promotes ‘growth and competitiveness, and
a truncated, market-based equality (equal treatment) that does not chal-
lenge structural and systemic gender injustices’.
In Spain, EU austerity politics aligned with the conservative govern-
ment’s neoliberal priorities and produced gender impacts such as the
increase in the gender pay gap, unemployment, and the deregulation and
worsening of labour market conditions for workers. The country’s gender
regime shifted to a more neoliberal form in times of austerity. However,
the increased constraints for women in the labour market and the per-
sistent unequal gender division of domestic work have not yet pushed
Spanish women back to the domestic sphere, as women’s high activity rate
testifies. Conservative actors have nonetheless been active in reinforcing
traditional gender roles and limiting women’s autonomy. The conserva-
tive project in Spain has manifested through the Popular Party’s promo-
tion of a pro-life approach to abortion, shown in the anti-abortion bill at
the national level and the adoption of laws on the protection of pregnant
women and the rights of the embryo at the regional level.
In Portugal, neoliberal politics leading to a deregulated labour market,
salary cuts, an increase in working hours, lack of career advancement, and
cuts in social benefits, made both the female and male labour force more
precarious and flexible. However, gender disparities in pay, precarious, and
part-time work increased during the economic crisis. The hegemony of
the neoliberal economic discourse in Parliamentary debates made gen-
der inequality problems seem unimportant, and when gender inequality
was discussed it was always in relation to the economy. The diminishing
state support in times of economic hardship provoked a return to more
traditional gender roles in the family, as women increasingly took the role
of community support, caregiving, and redistributive assistance to com-
266 J. KANTOLA AND E. LOMBARDO
pensate for the loss of economic and welfare support. Yet, the impact of
austerity politics on the reinforcement of traditional gender roles is absent
from Portuguese parliamentary debates.
Europeanization dynamics in times of crisis also led to the downscal-
ing and curtailing of gender equality institutions and policies in Spain and
Ireland. The consolidation of the Spanish institutional framework on gen-
der equality was abruptly interrupted with the elimination, at the central
level, of the Ministry for Equality and location of all equality issues in a
new Ministry of Health, Social Services, and Equality, the replacement of
the former State Secretariat for Equality with a new State Secretariat with
broader competences on social services and equality, and the downgrad-
ing of the historic Woman’s Institute to be dependent from a lower rank
institution. The broadening of competences of the equality institutions
was inversely proportional to the budgets they were allocated, with cuts
in gender equality policies at both national and regional levels, while the
local level lost its competence for developing activities for the promotion
of gender equality. Also in Ireland, equality institutions were eliminated or
integrated in other governmental bodies, as shown in the inclusion of the
Combat Poverty Agency in the Department of Social Affairs, or the down-
grading of the Human Rights Commission and the Equality Authority.
mality for minority women. In other words, discussions about both the
effects and the struggles against the crisis foreground the experiences of
the hegemonic white majority in Europe. The political actions of minority
women become either invisible or hypervisible in relation to some issues
that are constructed as problems of minority cultures.
In Spain, argues Lombardo, the EU and domestic neoliberal and con-
servative politics promoted an intensification of feminist and civil society’s
struggles against austerity and in favour of democracy, gender, and social
equality. Spanish feminist movement was part of the broader Indignados
social movement asking for real democracy and defending public health,
housing, and education policies from neoliberal attacks. While making alli-
ances with other social movements, feminist organizations also developed
their own agenda, strengthening their national and transnational mobi-
lization strategies to resist the curtailing of gender equality policies and
institutions, to defend women’s autonomy and self-determination, and to
redefine the concept of work as including both productive and reproduc-
tive activities.
Austerity politics provoked changes in the Finnish feminist movements.
The chapter by Elomäki and Kantola illustrates how the traditional wom-
en’s organizations, representing majority women, have had particular dif-
ficulties in resisting the Finnish government’s austerity politics. This has
created space for new women’s movement actors and trade unions. They
too have tended to prioritize resisting the austerity politics and failing
to tackle the racism that underpins the government actions. The case of
Finland illustrates the linkages between neoliberalism, conservatism, and
racism, which result in challenges for feminist struggles and resistance.
The politics of the crisis can be captured through analyses of discur-
sive power contestations. Cavaghan argues that the political dimension of
the EU financial crisis consists in making contestations around competing
gender knowledges visible. In her chapter, she grasps the differences in
the feminist and the mainstream economic discourses in relation to the
hegemony of macroeconomics in EU policy after the crisis. Taking the EU
arena as a space of ‘knowledge contest’, she documents the difficulties that
feminist activists within the Parliament, the Commission, and civil society
experience, finding the appropriate technical vocabulary in a post-crisis
context dominated by macroeconomic aims and jargon. Cavaghan’s chap-
ter importantly reflects on how these processes of discursive hegemony of
macroeconomic language have ‘insulated from contestation’ the gendered
impacts of EU economic policy responses to the crisis.
268 J. KANTOLA AND E. LOMBARDO
Conclusions
Feminist analyses of the political dimension of the crisis in Europe devel-
oped in this book have employed and differently combined approaches
that focused on women, gender, intersectionality, and deconstruction of
gender. These analytical perspectives have allowed contributors to grasp
the multiple facets of power that are at work in policy responses to the eco-
nomic crisis in Europe. EU policy shifts in times of crisis have shown the
increasing dominance of the neoliberal project (Walby 2015). This trend
is reflected in the Europeanization of member states’ equality policies,
institutions, regimes, and political debates, with detrimental consequences
for gender equality, institutions, and policies.
EU and member states’ neoliberal austerity politics has promoted
practices and processes of de-democratization that negatively affect
the fates of democracy and gender equality (Verloo forthcoming). As
Walby (2015: 117) argues ‘The neoliberal project of deregulation is a
project of de-democratization’ because it removes from public demo-
cratic accountability ‘t]he governance of major public services, such as
finance, health, education and care’ (2015: 116). De-democratization is
exemplified in the shift in the balance of institutional powers in the EU
that attributes an increasing weight to the member states, especially the
Council of Economic and Finance Ministers, while new regulations on
‘strategic’ reports have reduced the chances for the Parliamentary FEMM
Committee, that has always had a key role in advancing gender equality,
to see its own-initiative reports presented and voted in plenary sessions.
CONCLUSIONS: UNDERSTANDING GENDER AND THE POLITICS... 269
Note
1. For reports on increased discrimination in Europe see: International
Labour Conference, 101st Session 2012, Report of the Committee of
Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations,
Greece, ILO Conventions 98, 100, 102, 111, and 156: http://www.
ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11003:0::NO and FEMM
(2010) Report on gender aspects of the economic downturn and finan-
cial crisis (2009/2204(INI)), (12 May 2010) and FEMM (2013a)
Report on the impact of the economic crisis on gender equality and wom-
en’s rights (2012/2301(INI)), (28 February 2013).
270 J. KANTOLA AND E. LOMBARDO
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Index
204, 212, 215, 231, 234, 235, Glasgow, 187, 197, 200, 203
239, 264, 268 González, Elvira, 15, 210, 217,
Finland, 11, 16, 18, 21, 231–51, 260, 218
262, 264, 267, 269 Gourevitch, Peter, 27
Fiscal Compact, 9, 145, 153 governance, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 17, 18,
Foucauldian, 163 34, 36, 65, 66, 84, 85, 88n8,
Framework Agreement, 30 95–101, 103, 104, 106, 111,
Framework for Action on Gender 112, 118, 140, 146, 212, 214,
Equality, 39 246, 259, 268, 269
France, 17, 20, 125, 150, 185–205, Great Britain, 140, 142, 143, 145
262, 266, 269 Great Recession, 44, 95, 101
Freire, Andre, 162, 163, 167, 176, Greece, 1, 2, 5, 15, 17, 83, 140,
177 147, 153, 156n1, 179n3, 264,
269n1
Greens, 176
G Griffin, Penny, 5, 17
Gael Fine, 152 growth, 8–10, 44n6, 57, 59–63, 65,
Gag law, 16, 18, 224, 269 84, 86, 110, 118, 121, 125, 130,
Galicia, 221 140, 141, 146, 150, 202, 215,
Gender Aspects of the Economic 216, 241, 265
Downturn & Financial Crisis, Guaranteed Employment Benefit
102, 269n1 Fund, 123
gender equality,, 3, 27, 50, 73, 100, Guerrina, Roberta, 20, 81, 95–112,
118, 139, 162, 188, 209, 231, 259, 261, 262
258 guilt, 6, 152
Gender Impact Now!, 219, 223
Gender Impact Report, 219
Gender Knowledge Contestation H
Analysis, 49–51, 53–6, 64, 66n2 health, 9, 13, 14, 57, 75, 124, 142,
gender mainstreaming, 5, 11, 12, 19, 144, 145, 147, 151, 154, 166,
27, 29, 33, 34, 37, 40, 44n1, 167, 179n6, 179n11, 213, 214,
50–3, 60, 63, 74–6, 81, 83, 101, 219–21, 224, 236, 266–8
118, 119, 121, 126, 127, 129, High Level Group on Gender
130, 216, 260, 261 Mainstreaming, 27, 37, 44n1
gender regime, 5, 14, 20, 28, 37, 40, Hill Collins, Patricia, 189
41, 209–27, 232, 261, 263–5 Hollande, François, 196
Gendered International Political Holyrood, 196
Economy, 140 homeownership, 143–6, 148, 149
General Council of Judicial Power, household, 8, 15, 16, 20, 104, 107,
223 139–47, 149–52, 155, 164, 165,
Germany, 9, 125, 142, 143 191, 196, 201, 211, 213, 217
INDEX 277
I K
Iceland, 1 Kantola, Johanna, 1–21, 34, 38, 42,
ICTU Fighting Back Biennial 45n8, 50, 81, 82, 231–51,
Women’s Conference, 154 257–69
immigrants, 15, 151, 187, 188, 190, Karamessini, Maria, 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11,
191, 193, 237 13–15, 51, 74, 76, 96–8, 117,
immigration, 31, 88n4, 150, 193, 126, 140, 162, 164
236, 249 Keynesian, 57
Impacto de Género ya!, 219
implementation, 10, 19, 31, 50, 54,
55, 65, 75, 120, 130, 132n1, L
149, 167, 179n6, 179n11, 215 Labour Code, 118, 122, 123, 132n5
Independents for Change, 152 Labour Fund, 123
India, 189, 191, 199 labour market, 9, 11–16, 18, 30, 31,
Indignados, 6, 152, 224, 225, 267 33, 42, 44n2, 58, 59, 62, 105–7,
institutionalism, 19, 77–9, 87n2 109, 118, 121–31, 139, 189–91,
insurance, 123, 124, 143–5, 248 200, 215–18, 224, 225, 231,
Integrated Guidelines for Growth and 234, 242, 247, 248, 260, 264,
Jobs, 61–3 265, 268
Integration project, 79, 82, 141 Labour Party, 152, 154
International Labour Organisation Labour Reform, 217, 218, 224, 263
(ILO), 96, 98, 269n1 Latin America, 153
International Monetary Fund (IMF), law, 3, 16, 29–31, 40, 43, 54, 55, 117,
2, 9, 10, 117, 132n2, 179n6, 124–7, 131, 146, 213–15, 218,
195 219, 221, 222, 225, 226n13,
Interpretative Policy Analysis, 53 226n15, 235, 247, 260, 263
intersectionality, 3–7, 17, 20, 41, Legal Experts Network, 13, 36
186–9, 258, 266, 268 Lehman Brothers, 1, 4
Ireland, 1, 20, 140, 141, 143, Lehman Sisters, 4
146–55, 260, 262–4, 266, 269 Leite, Jorge, 164, 165
Irish Feminist Network, 154 León, Margarita, 210, 213, 218, 219
Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, 153 LGBTQ, 6
Irish Housing Network, 154, 155 Lisbon Strategy, 33, 58–65
Italy, 1, 15, 140 Lisbon Treaty, 28, 30, 37
278 INDEX
120, 154, 155, 166, 179n10, populist, 2, 6, 16, 17, 131, 224, 231,
188, 203, 243, 244, 249, 260, 234, 236, 239, 269
261 Portugal, 1, 20, 140, 147, 161–6,
Newman, Janet, 195, 197 168, 170, 178, 179n6, 179n11,
NGO, 19, 45, 237 180n17, 260, 263, 265, 268
Niemeyer, Simon, 163 post-deconstruction, 6, 258
Nordic, 16 post-feminism, 233
Northern, 7, 17 poverty, 1, 5, 17, 20, 33, 62, 104,
107, 110, 127, 128, 151, 152,
155, 164, 174, 176, 189, 191–4,
O 199, 201, 204, 261, 263
O’Callaghan, 147, 149 power, 2, 6, 7, 9, 19, 34, 36, 43, 60,
Occupy Wall Street, 224 77, 78, 81, 83, 85, 86, 97, 98,
OECD, 128, 129, 151, 190 101, 104, 111, 143, 148, 150,
Osborne, George, 196, 205n3 154, 163, 166, 167, 174, 178,
194, 200–2, 204, 223, 225, 244,
247, 249, 250, 258–60, 266–9
P Prata, Ana, 20, 161–80, 259, 260,
Pakistan, 189, 191, 197 268
Paleo, Natalia, 164, 212, 219, 221–3 precarious, 109, 131, 165, 194, 197,
Paris, 187, 192, 193, 199, 204 217, 261, 263–6
part-time, 14, 15, 145, 151, 155, 165, precarity/precariousness, 173, 174,
211, 218, 247, 248, 265 186, 189, 190, 193, 196, 198,
paternity leave, 129, 213, 214, 218 200, 201, 218, 224
Pavolini, Emmanuele, 212, 219 pregnant, 108, 175, 222, 265
pay, 15, 28, 40, 50, 59, 60, 79, 80, President of the European
100, 109, 147, 149, 165, 175, Commission, 80
190, 194, 200, 217, 240, 245, President of the European Council, 125
247, 248, 250, 265 privatization, 16, 125, 128–30, 142,
Phoenix, Aisha, 192 145, 147, 155, 212, 216, 224,
Phoenix, Ann, 192 225, 261, 264
Platform Against Housing Evictions PROGRESS programme, 32, 39,
(PAH), 152, 155 44n3
Platform of people affected by housing property, 144, 145, 147–50, 152
evictions, 223, 224 Prügl, Elisabeth, 4, 17, 45n8, 52, 100
Podemos, 17, 152, 224 Public Expenditure and Reform
Poland, 13, 16, 20, 117–33, 150, 262, (PER), 153
264, 265 public sector, 4, 14, 15, 105, 107,
political behaviour, 189 109, 125, 139, 144, 147, 149,
political parties, 17, 154, 167, 169, 153, 154, 162, 164, 165, 196,
177, 189, 214, 236–41 217, 234, 239, 247, 248, 250n5,
Popular party, 222, 265 263, 264
280 INDEX
welfare state, 15, 16, 103–5, 107, 142, Women’s Economic Independence in
150, 162, 164, 165, 167, 178, times of austerity, 110
196, 205n1, 210, 212, 213, 219, Women’s International Day,
234, 238, 241, 242 177
West African, 200, 203 women’s movements, 167, 168, 177,
Western European, 123 236, 237, 241, 242, 248, 260,
Westminster, 196 267
WI. See Woman’s Institute (WI) Woodward, Alison, 12, 34, 81, 82,
Wöhl, Stefanie, 9, 10, 14, 20, 75, 85, 100, 101, 106, 108, 112
86, 139–56, 259, 260, 262–4
Woman’s Institute (WI), 213, 214,
220, 266 Z
Women of Debt Justice Action, 154 Zapatero, 209, 211, 213, 214, 218,
Women’s Budget Group, 98 220
Women’s Charter of 2010, 31, 42 Zbyszewska, Ania, 13, 14, 16, 20,
Women’s Democratic Movement, 177 117–33, 259, 263–5