Gender Equality and the EU's Economic Governance: The Strategic Use of Women’s Employment Within Labor Market Reforms in Italy

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article aims to evaluate the political implications of post-crisis governance in the European Union for national gender-equality strategies and policies. It presents a study of recent reforms of the labor market in Italy, where the response to the Eurozone crisis has increased concerns over the low rate of female employment. Through an analysis of policy documents and legislative reforms informed by discursive politics, the article argues that the Italian case provides evidence of the trend toward the further instrumentalization of gender equality, which has been strategically used in order to provide additional legitimation for labor market deregulation.</jats:p>

Gender and Crises in European Economic Governance: Is this Time Different?*

“…Additional research at the member state level found similar results, with a particular understanding of gender equality as equivalent to (and limited to) labour force activation leading to the co-option of gender equality language in the pursuit of labour market deregulation. This has been identified by work on Italy (Chieregato, 2021), Ireland (Cullen and Murphy, 2017) and Finland (Elomäki, 2019), among others.…”

The gendered history of economic and monetary union

“…Among the policy options closed off, are those that could promote gender equality. Instead, many member states have seen a narrowing of gender equality policy to that which supports other policy goals, in particular economic growth (Chieregato 2020 ; Cullen and Murphy 2017 ; Elomäki 2019 ). That it is structural is not to say that it is not political—rather, it is to point to the fact that it is political in its very construction, that politics is happening not only when policy makers or politicians make decisions within the system.…”

‘It’s a total no-no’: The strategic silence about gender in the European Parliament’s economic governance policies

“…Abels and Mushaben, 2012; Weiner and MacRae, 2014). Despite political commitments to integrate the gender perspective into the European Semester, and the efforts of gender equality actors within the EU institutions to raise awareness of the gendered impacts of austerity (Guerrina, 2017), the visibility of gender equality in economic governance has remained low and focused on labor market issues (Chieregato, 2020). The absence of a gender perspective has been connected to the absence of women at the negotiation tables (Walby, 2015), dominant gender ideologies within the institutions (Guerrina, 2017), as well as to discourse(s) of economic expertise that explicitly exclude feminist concerns (O’Dwyer, 2019).…”

“…Low-income and minority women have borne the brunt of austerity policies and retrenchment of welfare states that has been reinforced by the governance framework (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017;Kantola and Lombardo, 2017). The implemented policies reduced both the level and the scope of public provisioning, increased the burdens of unpaid care work, and intensified the crisis of social reproduction (Bruff and Wöhl, 2016;Klatzer and Schlager, 2019), while at the same time pushing women into the labor market (Chieregato, 2020). The EU's economic governance has thus played a key role in the shift toward a neoliberal gender regime, which requires women's contribution both at home and in the labor market (Walby, 2015).…”