Challenging the EU’s ‘Post-Crisis’ Economic Model: Contesting Gender Blindness

The 1990s saw a wave of growth and expansion in the EU’s gender equality architecture.  The Commission committed to mainstreaming gender in all areas, and a gender pillar in the EU’s Lisbon Strategy began to explicitly promote measures such as childcare to enable women’s economic independence. Nonetheless some fields maintained a stubborn refusal to engage with gender mainstreaming during this period – amongst them, key EU policy areas such as macroeconomics and competition (Hoskyns 2008). Since the financial crisis, multiple commentators have described how new macroeconomic surveillance mechanisms and rigid austerity politics have driven a ‘U-turn’ on the EU’s commitments to gender equality, seeing the implementation of cuts and restructuring, which have profoundly affected women’s employment, working conditions and access to state services (Klatzer and Schlager 2011; Rubery and Karamissini 2014). This paper examines ‘the crisis’ as a critical juncture enabling a reconfiguration of the EU’s normative priorities where gender blindness proved more entrenched than gender mainstreaming.  

To this end, the paper maps ‘the crisis’ to examine how 1) the EU’s core economic policies have proved impervious to subsequent gendered critique emanating from the EU parliament, the gender unit in the Commission and feminist civil society and 2) feminist civil society’s efforts to mobilise and contest the renewed dominance of a gender-blind economic model.  In doing so, the paper deepens our understanding of what ‘crises’ are, and the role they play in steering EU integration and its (gendered) impacts.