The Role of Gender in the EU's Economic Crisis Response - Lessons from the 'Last Crisis'

There is now a significant literature that highlights the gendered nature of economic governance in the European Union. This builds upon research that demonstrates the gendered nature of the economy, and the gendered impacts of policy interventions. This paper draws on that research to set out some important lessons learned through analysis of the Euro area financial crisis. Four key lessons are identified and discussed; the first concerning the importance of gender mainstreaming along with its limitations, the second concerning the importance of framing in a crisis and in the development of crisis responses, the third on the importance of gender to understandings of the politics of legitimacy, and the fourth and final lesson that economic policy is itself a gendered and gendering policy. This paper therefore connects the feminist literature on the European Economic Governance to debates on the Covid-19 response, using a focus on gender and gender equality to examine key continuities between the crisis fighting of the economic crisis to the crisis response in 2020.