Care to reform: what role for gender equality in NGEU?

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the reliance of contemporary societies on care labour and the asymmetric distribution of the burden of care across genders. The disruption of care services entailed by Covid-19 containment measures forced women to reduce their working hours or resign, negatively affecting the progress towards a more gender equal society. In this context, the European responses to the pandemic through the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) created a momentum to address the gender dimension of EU social policies that the pandemic made more visible and pressing. Starting from these premises, this paper explores the integration of a gender dimension within the policy design of the NGEU plan through a specific focus on care policies. This paper retraces the relationship between women’s descriptive and substantive representation in the drafting of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RFF) Regulation. By doing so, it assesses the correlation between the participation of women into the policy formulation and the incorporation of women’s group interests – i.e. women-friendly care policies – into the policy design. It must be noted that women’s descriptive representation is not defined by looking exclusively at women MEPs. Instead, this paper adopts a broad definition including the “velvet triangle”, the network of feminist eurocrats, experts and women’s movement activists. This provides a more accurate depiction of the key actors influencing the policy process. This is evident also in the analysis of women’s substantive representation, that showcases the role of the velvet triangle in integrating a gender perspective into the RRF Regulation. In fact, while no reference to gender equality was present in the first draft of the regulation proposed by the European Commission, the situation was redressed thanks to the intervention of the European Parliament, as well as the advocacy efforts of civil society organisations. Relatedly, care policies are confirmed as one of the main instruments through which gender equality is addressed within NGEU, strongly coded through the lenses of social investment, with its focus on human capital investment and youth.