56.4
EU Responses to the Financial Crisis: Marginalizing Gender Equality?
imperatives which have formed the EU’s raison d’être - the EU has a long track record of subordinating or co-opting gender equality
aspirations into the service of economic ones (Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2000, Rubery 2003), particularly in ‘technocratic’ areas of economic policy, such as competition, de-regulation and Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (Hoskyns 2008, Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2000). Research has documented how policy makers often use economic imperatives to argue either the irrelevance of gender (Caglar 2008, Cavaghan 2013) or to justify their ignorance of how gender might be relevant (Schmidt 2005).
Given the EU’s central importance as a champion of gender equality and the increased salience of economic policies after the financial crisis, this paper argues that feminist researchers must develop a fuller understanding of how the EU’s policy responses to the financial do, or do not, respond to the EU’s normative gender equality/GM imperatives. Using methods which drawn on the sociology of knowledge and interpretative policy analysis, this paper presents analysis of policy documents and processes with the EU Commission to explore normative commitment to gender equality, or the lack thereof, embedded within the EU’s policy responses to the financial crisis, focusing on the methods of thinking and the gendered normative values and assumptions or ‘gender knowledge’ (Cavaghan 2012) which dominate amongst policy makers in these fields.
This kind of investigation enables an examination of the particular challenges which the increased dominance of economic and/or neo-liberal or logics present to gender inequality and the resulting reconfiguration of normative priorities within the EU.