The Gender Politics of EU Economic Policy: Policy Shifts and Contestations Before and After the Crisis

Abstract

Since the financial crisis we seem to be witnessing a re-invigorated refusal to acknowledge, analyse or rectify the gendered impacts of the EU’s strategic policies. This chapter examines how this ‘U-turn’ on EU commitment to gender equality has occurred, focusing on the contestation of gendered meanings and assumptions embedded in EU economic policy. Drawing on insights from Feminist Political Economy and a new approach, Gender Knowledge Contestation Analysis, findings shows how common disciplinary practices in economic policy and economics, obscure gendered impacts of economic policy and insulate them from contestation. Here, shifts in the balance between the EU’s ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ economic aims, have played a key role, as EU strategic policy has become increasingly dominated by abstract, rule-based macro economically conceived goals.