Scholarship on gender and the European Union (EU) has consistently pointed out that EU gender equality policies have always been embedded in the logic of the market and that the economic framing has had negative impacts on the content and concepts of these policies. This article provides novel insights into this discussion by combining a discursive approach focused on framings with insights of feminist economists and examining how the relationship between gender equality and the economy has been conceptualized in EU policy documents from the 1980s up until the present day. The article identifies the key actors and processes behind the escalation of economic arguments for gender equality and makes visible the economic assumptions that underpin EU gender equality policy. It argues that in recent years the European institutions have intentionally developed and propagated a market-oriented gender equality discourse, the economic case for gender equality, which highlights the macroeconomic benefits of gender equality. The economic case reaffirms the gender-biased assumptions of neoclassical economic theory and legitimizes the EU's current economic priorities and policies, many of which are detrimental to gender equality. The European Commission represents the argument that gender equality contributes to economic growth as an innovative way to promote gender equality. However, the economic case represents a risk for gender equality advocates, because it may tame the emerging feminist criticism of the EU's economic policies and governance.
The European Union’s (EU) economic governance is pivotal for gender equality in the EU, yet gender equality concerns have been sidelined in governance processes. This article analyzes the struggles involved in integrating a gender perspective into the EU’s economic governance in the European Parliament (EP). It explores how the EP, often perceived as a champion of gender equality, constructs gender in relation to economic governance and how conflicts between the EP’s political groups and committees influence the EP’s ability to challenge gendered inequalities related to the governance regime. This article reveals that the EP’s positions have been characterized by strategic silence about gender and understandings of gender equality as a productive factor that legitimized gendered policies. Party-political conflicts and compromises that have sidelined critical views, and a boundary between social and economic issues and actors, were key barriers for the integration of critical gender perspectives.
This article contributes to literature on gender and austerity by analysing recent neoliberal transformations of governance that have facilitated the adoption of highly gendered austerity measures and constrained the conditions for gender equality policy in Finland. It examines two austerity-enhancing governance reforms: the national implementation of the new European Union (EU) economic governance rules and the OECD-inspired reform of the government's political steering process. Whereas the EUreinforced development of a new steering model for public finance has made austerity a permanent state of affairs, the reform of the government's political steering process has subsumed all other political goals to the fiscal frame and pushed gender equality off the political agenda. Both governance reforms have depoliticised and de-democratised political decision making, making it more difficult to contest the gendered consequences of austerity.
This article explores the possibilities and constraints for feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and its influence over policy making and public debate in the context of austerity and neoliberal governance. By analysing the process in which a group of Finnish academic feminists used their expert position to influence government policy in 2015–2017, the article illustrates the strategies they adopted to engage in political debates and how they negotiated the new political landscape. The research material was derived from two years of action research and participant observation and is considered through the theoretical lens of governance feminism. The article makes a distinctive contribution to extant theories of governance feminism, by drawing upon theories of affects and ambivalence as a complement to governance feminism's focus on discourses and co‐optation. We coin the term affective virtuosity to highlight the importance of affect in feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and in shaping the various perspectives available to feminist scholars in encounters with politicians and policymakers.
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