Feminists and Femocrats: Gendering COVID-19 Recovery in North America and Europe

In April 2020, Hawaiian feminists proposed the world’s first feminist COVID-19 recovery plan. Their idea of centering the concerns of women and other marginalized groups in order to “build back better” rapidly gained traction in international policy circles, with activists across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Africa proposing their own feminist plans. Yet when, how, and to extent do these initiatives gain traction and do they truly represent radical approaches to policy design? This paper analyzes how feminists gained influence—or failed to gain influence—over governments’ COVID-19 response and recovery. Using process tracing and interviews from case studies in the Americas (Canada and Argentina) and Europe (Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland), I argue that COVID-19 created new opportunities for grassroots organizations and feminist bureaucrats (“femocrats”) to lobby for long-sought solutions, such as universal childcare. Activists and femocrats used feminist COVID-19 recovery plans as entry points, seeking audiences with and influence over chief executives and their inner circles. In doing so, they combined old strategies with new rhetoric: they leveraged informal networks and built bridges across partisan divides (old tactic), and rhetorically, they positioned their approach as explicitly feminist and intersectional (new framing). While a feminist framing could raise resistance and even generate backlash, actors aimed to dissociate feminist recovery from the oft-discredited approach of gender mainstreaming. However, my closer look reveals that strategies matter more than framing, and efforts around feminist COVID-19 recovery plans largely follow the same patterns seen in earlier era’s efforts to achieve gender mainstreaming. Where women activists and policymakers collaborated and enjoyed significant access to decision-making power—as in Canada and Argentina—policies changed in ways that dramatically shifted the gendered status quo. But where women activists and femocrats lacked access to decision-making power, as in Hawaii and the United Kingdom, policy change stalled and elite male expertise became retrenched. Crisis provides policy entrepreneurs with opportunities, but new framing alone cannot shift the status quo.