Gendered/ing Economisation: Development and Use of the Economic Case for Gender Equality in the EU

EU institutions, national governments and women's organizations in Europe are increasingly using arguments about macroeconomic and business benefits of gender equality in order to advance gender equality policies. This paper offers new analytical and theoretical tools for understanding what is at stake, when gender equality is framed in terms of economic growth, competitiveness and financial benefits. It also provides new knowledge about the processes and actors behind the economization of gender equality discourses at the EU-level as well as about the effects of economized discourses. The empirical part of the paper focuses on four recent EU-level projects and policies. EIGE's “Benefits of Gender Equality” project and Eurofound's project to develop a method to assess the costs of the gender employment gap share the aim of providing empirical evidence of the economic gains that could be achieved through stronger gender equality policies. European Commission's Equality Pays Off initiative to tackle the gender pay gap and the Commission's work on women on boards rely on economic argumentation. Whereas the first two initiatives raise questions about the gendered assumptions and knowledge behind economic arguments, the other two call for a reflection on how the shift towards economic arguments has effected the content of gender equality policy initiatives. The paper argues that analyzing economised gender equality discourses requires combining Foucauldian analysis of neoliberalism as the extension of economic priorities, values, knowledge and practices to all areas of life with feminist economics and political economy that help to understand how these priorities, values, knowledge and practices are gendered. The paper develops the notion gendered/ing economization as an analytical tool to understand the stakes and effects of the increasing use of economic justifications to promote gender equality.