One year after the onset of the financial crisis, the EWL has published a Statement to the attention of European policy makers. At this time, predictions abound concerning the ‘end’ of recession and the return to growth, but the EWL analysis of the effects of the crisis and the nature of the reform packages that our governments have put in place to tackle it, is critical.
Due to persistent gender inequalities, the crisis was from the start, and remains, gendered in its nature and its effects. Women’s absence from decision-making positions in those fields that caused the crash has been well-documented, but the attention given to lay-offs in the construction and car industries has further exacerbated the misleading image of this crisis as one that concerns primarily men. Women, more integrated into the labour market than ever before, are nevertheless also direct victims, especially as women are more likely than men to be in precarious employment positions. There are four times as many women as men in part-time jobs in the EU, an area excluded from unemployment statistics. Their families, to whom women dedicate a higher proportion of their income than their partners, will also suffer.
The EWL argued from the beginning that it was essential to acknowledge, understand and analyse the impact of the crisis on women, and to design recovery plans at national, European and international levels that would explicitly seek to address and rectify this impact. In one sense, the crisis and subsequent reforms represented an opportunity to ensure that the same weaknesses in our systems were not allowed to persevere and produce similar catastrophic effects in the future, including the absence of women in economic and financial decision-making and the lack of regard for innovative thinking and methods such as gender budgeting and feminist economics. This has not happened. At the European level, the recovery plan was explicitly gender blind.
The effects of the crisis are far from over, and while many key opportunities to learn from history and implement much-needed changes have already been passed by, more are yet to come. Nevertheless, this window of opportunity cannot stay open indefinitely. Continuous denial of the gender impact of the crisis coupled with the exclusion of women from the shaping the post-crisis framework runs the very serious risk of leading to a rapid return to a ‘business-as-usual’ approach, which while designed for ‘recovery’, will only in the long term have detrimental consequences for all stakeholders, not least women. Political will and concrete actions are needed now.