Austerity has become the new principle for public policy in Europe and the US as the financial crisis of 2008 has been converted into a public debt crisis. However, current austerity measures risk losing past progress towards gender equality by undermining important employment and social welfare protections and putting gender equality policy onto the back burner. This volume constitutes the first attempt to identify how the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies are affecting women in Europe and the US, tracing the consequences for gender equality in employment and welfare systems in nine case studies from countries facing the most severe adjustment problems. The contributions adopt a common framework to analyse women in recession, which takes into account changes in women’s position and current austerity conditions. The findings demonstrate that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, employment gaps between women and men declined — but due only to a deterioration in men’s employment position rather than any improvements for women. Tables are set to be turned by the austerity policies which are already having a more negative impact on demand for female labour and on access to services which support working mothers. Women are nevertheless reinforcing their commitment to paid work, even at this time of increasing demands on their unpaid domestic labour. Future prospects are bleak. Current policy is reinforcing the same failed mechanisms that caused the crisis in the first place and is stalling or even reversing the long term growth in social investment in support for care. This book makes the case for gender equality to be placed at the centre of any progressive plan for a route out of the crisis.

Austerity has become the new principle for public policy in Europe and the US as the financial crisis of 2008 has been converted into a public debt crisis. However, current austerity measures risk losing past progress towards gender equality by undermining important employment and social welfare protections and putting gender equality policy onto the back burner. This volume constitutes the first attempt to identify how the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies are affecting women in Europe and the US, tracing the consequences for gender equality in employment and welfare systems in nine case studies from countries facing the most severe adjustment problems. The contributions adopt a common framework to analyse women in recession, which takes into account changes in women’s position and current austerity conditions. The findings demonstrate that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, employment gaps between women and men declined — but due only to a deterioration in men’s employment position rather than any improvements for women. Tables are set to be turned by the austerity policies which are already having a more negative impact on demand for female labour and on access to services which support working mothers. Women are nevertheless reinforcing their commitment to paid work, even at this time of increasing demands on their unpaid domestic labour. Future prospects are bleak. Current policy is reinforcing the same failed mechanisms that caused the crisis in the first place and is stalling or even reversing the long term growth in social investment in support for care. This book makes the case for gender equality to be placed at the centre of any progressive plan for a route out of the crisis.

As austerity measures continue throughout Europe, its effects are felt differently by different groups of citizens. This book looks at how minority women in France and Britain have coped with austerity. Crucially, it casts them not as passive victims, but as active agents finding ways to survive, using their race, class, gender, and legal status as resources for collective action at a moment when left-wing politics and non-governmental organizations have failed them. Making use of in-depth case studies, Minority Women and Austerity offers an unprecedented look at the changing relationship among the state, the market, and civil society, and the opportunities and dilemmas that creates for minority women.

Austerity has dominated the policy agenda in the past decade. Although it appeared to end with the COVID-19 pandemic, a return to harsh cutbacks in the future cannot be ruled out. In this incisive analysis, Diane Perrons shows that while austerity policies have devastating effects on people's lives, their gendered dynamics are particularly conspicuous: budget cuts have been overwhelmingly aimed at services used by women. She shows how the gender aspects of this economic and social catastrophe intersected with a range of other factors, making the experience of austerity very different for different groups - and highly unjust. Not only that, it undermined responses to COVID-19. She finishes by critiquing the justifications for austerity policies and asks whether there are compelling alternatives that can re-invigorate economies and societies after the pandemic, and avoid a return to austerity. This compelling book will be essential reading for activists, policymakers and students of feminist political economy everywhere.​

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, Dabrowski makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state’s legitimization of austerity and women’s everyday experiences, she reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, this book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity.

Austerity, a response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain.In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expos� of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.

The full impact of austerity policies across Europe is still being assessed, but it is clear that their gendered impacts have been consistently severe, structural and manifold. They have also been, until now, under-researched and under-estimated. This book brings together the research of leading feminist economists in the area of gender and austerity economics to perform a rigorous gender-impact analysis both at national and pan-European levels. The chapters not only offer thorough evidence for the detrimental gender-impact of austerity policies across Europe, but they also provide readers with concrete suggestions of alternative policies that national governments and the European Union should adopt. With a combination of country case studies and cross-country empirical analysis, this book reveals the scope and channels through which women and men have been impacted by austerity policies in Europe, and goes on to offer readers the opportunity to assess the feasibility and implications of a feminist alternative to continued austerity. This book will be invaluable to social science students and researchers, as well to as policy-makers searching not just for a Plan B to continued austerity policies but for a Plan F – a feminist economic strategy to stimulate sustainable economic recovery.