The EU Childcare Strategy Evolution: From Gender Equality to Social Investment

This Paper assesses the impact which the EU’s distinctive welfare policy ‘social investment’ has had on the EU’s gender equality agenda. In recent years, the EU has made increasing reference to “social investment” in social policy development. In theory, social investment approaches encourage women’s labour force participation and support work-family policies. The central aims of social investment is to invest in children in order to develop their human capital so as to prepare them for future employment and to end the intergenerational transfer of poverty. Because women continue to do most of the unpaid care such children-centred policies bear an obvious relation to gender equality. As such, social investment strategies might have contributed to raise gender equality awareness. However, a critical inspection of the policies on childcare in the EU reveals, that gender equality concerns are in fact none-inexistent. The Paper argues that the independently valuable goal of gender equality has been hijacked to ameliorate the economic and demographic challenges which the EU faces, and that the focus on children is serving to a narrow the concept of motherhood, in a manner which limits possibilities for gender equality within Member States. As such the EU’s ‘social investment’ policies play a part in the reproduction of an EU economic model which maintains unequal economic relations between women and men.