Ruling in a Crisis: Female Leaders and Intersectionality in Public Policy Reform

Academic commentators assume that the continuing financial and economic crisis has wide-ranging and deep effects on policy-making. It seems to many that political leaders tend to focus ever more on those who are already privileged: on the economic elites, on those with high or middle incomes and on the highly skilled, all with ill effects for the unemployed or socially marginalized. Drawing on the literature on intersectional inequalities along the lines of gender, class and ethnicity as well as on recent research on the inequality dimensions of political representation, we ask how the crisis affects public policy regarding the substantive representation of women? In discussing possible answers we are specifically interested in the role of female leaders and the policy decisions they support. Our empirical research focuses on a handful of female leaders and on 4 policy debates in current German politics: gender quotas on corporate boards, minimum wage, parental leave, and the care credit. Our findings indicate that the overarching effect of policies supported by female German leaders are more complex than often assumed by the above literature, which focuses on increasing class stratification: regarding women’s issues in the labor market the reforms are complementary and concerns of both high- and low-income women are addressed. The debates in the domain of family policy, however, are contradictory, because they set conflicting incentives, help the broad middle class but exclude poor women from a variety of benefits.