This paper engages with a paradox which the financial crisis has brought to
the fore: the uneasy coexistence of liberal and market focused logic with
the EU's normative commitments to gender equality (Perrons 2005; Coley
2014). As the EU and its member states have pursued an austerity agenda and developed a new economic governance regime (Klatzer and Schlager 2013), values of gender and wider social equality seem to be increasingly
marginalised (Bettio et al 2012; Hoskyns 2008, Lombardo 2013; Nousios,
Overbeek and Tsolakis 2012; Walby 2013ab). The paper examines the deeper political consequences for gender equality policies of EU austerity
measuresand the financial crisis within EU institutions and member
states by analysing the increasingly hegemonic economic assumptions present in policy responses to the financial crisis asking what notion of, or space for, social, gender, or redistributive justice they leave within the EU polity and its institutions.
