Abstract
This book is a wonderful gift to readers interested in the political economy of gender. Building on two international symposia the editors convened in late 2011 and early 2012, it includes 16 contributions from scholars in Europe as well as the USA, carefully examining the gendered consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and of the austerity policies that followed in its wake. The volume documents both the common experiences and the variations in the impact of the crisis on women across nine countries, each of which is analyzed in a separate chapter; there are also several more general chapters that include selected data on additional countries.
The book highlights two key overall findings that apply to all nine countries. First, unemployment rose more for men than for women in the immediate aftermath of the crisis (Greece is the one exception here), reflecting entrenched patterns of labor market segregation by gender, especially male overrepresentation in the most volatile sectors, such as building construction, manufacturing and the financial industry. Second, women were hit harder than men by the second phase of the crisis, as austerity policies spurred surging unemployment in the public sector, where women are overrepresented, along with cuts in public services that sustain families and provide support for work–family reconciliation, which also disproportionately affect women. In addition to documenting these gendered effects of the crisis, the contributors to this volume systematically examine the ramifications for future efforts to advance the goal of gender equality.
The editors are ideally situated to have undertaken this project. Maria Karamessini, a prominent expert on gender and employment in Greece, the European country most dramatically affected by the slump, offers an especially sophisticated account of the ways in which the crisis unfolded there as well as many insights for comparative analysis. Her co-editor, Jill Rubery, is well known for her earlier work on the topic of women and recession, especially the 1998 edited volume, Women and Recession. That book included studies of four countries (the UK, the USA, France and Italy); the volume under review here includes chapters on three of those four cases (France is omitted), but explores the issue on a more spacious canvas, with case studies of Iceland, Hungary, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain as well. This set of cases slants the volume toward an emphasis on the hardest hit countries (as Germany, France and the Nordic countries are not considered). Apart from the greater number of countries probed in depth, most of which suffered especially deeply from the crisis, this volume is also distinctly different from Rubery’s 1998 effort simply because the 2008 downturn was so much deeper and enduring than any previous economic contraction since the 1930s. Moreover, no previous crisis provoked the extreme austerity policies that emerged after 2008 in the global North. Thus this volume breaks new ground in a variety of crucial respects.
In much of southern Europe, the downturn was generally as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s, although that is far from the case in the USA or the UK. (Iceland, Italy, Ireland and Hungary are someplace in between). Still, the overall findings in this volume inevitably suggest many parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression. In both crises, unemployment initially rose more sharply among men, while women’s unemployment rose less and later. In both, unprecedented numbers of unemployed husbands became economically dependent on their wives, who became the sole income-earners in many households; at the same time, women’s unpaid household labor expanded to provide goods and services that had been purchased as market commodities prior to the slump. In both downturns, fertility rates fell and the number of multi-generational households rose as children returned to their parents’ homes, or parents moved in with their children. In both, young workers, as new labor market entrants, were disproportionately impacted by joblessness and underemployment – especially in countries with the strongest protections for incumbent workers, where vast inter-generational disparities have emerged. Both crises (although in the post-2008 period this occurred mainly in southern Europe) stimulated return migration from urban to rural areas – as well as some migration from poorer to richer countries within the EU, especially among young workers. Immigration from the global South to the USA and Europe declined sharply after the 2008 crash, and soon after that many recent immigrants returned (some voluntarily, others forcibly) to their countries of origin (recalling the 1930s wave of Mexican deportations from the USA).
These parallels to the 1930s are all the more striking in view of the fact that gender relations in Europe and North America have been so radically transformed in the intervening years. Indeed the backdrop for many of the analyses in this book is the massive rise in female labor force participation, especially among married women and mothers, in all nine countries. Equally important, recent decades saw the growing legitimacy of gender equality and the adoption of public policies designed to promote it in all nine countries. Although the timing and other details vary considerably from country to country, these basic changes have taken place in all nine of them. Another crucial change since the 1930s is the vast expansion of public sector employment, along with the establishment of extensive public welfare measures, including those supporting women’s employment and work–family reconciliation, such as parental leave and pay equity laws.
If the basic contours of the gender-related trends preceding the crisis and its structural impact on women are largely shared among countries, some of the most fascinating findings in the book involve variations across them. Randy Albelda’s chapter on the USA, for example, highlights the fact that the Obama administration’s economic stimulus program, while far smaller in scale than the New Deal programs of the 1930s to which it is often compared, is much more extensive than its counterparts in any of the European cases – a surprising development given the famously minimalist approach to welfare provision in the USA. Albeda also emphasizes the ways in which the crisis deepened inequalities among American women, disproportionately affecting women of color and less-educated women. The experience of the UK is similar in this regard. In striking contrast, however, as Karamessini’s chapter on Greece highlights, there unemployment was highest among highly educated women (although among Greek men the less-educated were hardest hit, as in the other countries examined here).
Iceland is anomalous in a different way: the exceptionally dramatic financial crisis there, as Thora Kristin Thorsdottir’s chapter shows, led to a sharply leftward political turn and the election of the country’s first female prime minister, whose government had an unprecedented political commitment to advancing gender equality. (However, in 2013, after this book went to press, the right wing parties were returned to power.) By contrast, in many of the other countries the immediate effect of the crisis was instead to put gender equality initiatives on the back burner, in part due to the disproportionate rise in male unemployment. In Hungary, as well as in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, moreover, the crisis precipitated a rightward political turn, leading to a retreat from gender equality policies – which were relatively recent and fragile in all four countries – even as harsh austerity measures disproportionately impacted women. (Italy does not entirely conform to this pattern, however, in part due to that nation’s sharp regional economic disparities.)
Although women’s labor market attachment remained strong (indeed, in some cases stronger than before the crisis) even in these countries, and explicit ideological backlash against women workers was rare (in sharp contrast to the 1930s), initiatives promoting gender equality that had gained momentum in the early 2000s, both at the European Union level and in many individual countries, were now marginalized or postponed, considered an unaffordable luxury in the crisis context. Post-crisis policy measures undertaken in Europe and the USA have been largely gender-blind, even though they have had highly gendered impacts. But as the penultimate chapter by Diane Perrons and Ania Plomien emphasizes, policy responses on both sides of the North Atlantic have been unwaveringly neoliberal in their thrust, and have failed to address the underlying drivers of the crisis and the massive growth in economic inequality that preceded it. Instead, class inequalities have continued to expand, including growing inequalities among women. Gender disparities have narrowed in some cases, but mostly because conditions have deteriorated so much for men, not because of any net improvements for women. Not only unemployment but also forms of labor market precarity that were once disproportionately experienced by women are increasingly widespread among men as well, a trend that began before the crisis but which has accelerated since.
As the editors’ closing chapter notes, it is too early to fully assess the long-term gender effects of austerity policies, although the trajectory thus far does not inspire optimism. In any case, this book’s richly detailed, nuanced analysis will make it an indispensable reference point for future research on the subject for many years to come.