Gender, austerity and the welfare state

The Great Recession prompted nearly all advanced welfare states to implement austerity policies as debt and deficit levels rose, a policy choice marked by extreme gender discrepancies in its outcomes. Using the 2007 global financial crisis as a case study, we argue that while male workers were most hard-hit at the start of the economic crisis, the turn toward fiscal austerity disproportionately harmed women in labor markets in the long-run. We show that as the financial crisis hit advanced welfare states, governments initially adopted stimulus measures to bolster the hardest-hit manufacturing and construction industries and protect the labor force in these sectors which was dominated by regular, full-time male workers. As the crisis progressed to more female-dominated sectors, such as services, trade, and public employment, most countries had begun to implement harsh austerity measures. While fiscal austerity was touted by proponents as a sensible response to growing debt and deficit concerns, the negative consequences of these measures were more pronounced for women. Although the gendered effects vary across welfare regime types, on average, austerity left female workers less protected from the economic crisis, as social safety nets became a major target of budgetary cuts. In sum, austerity measures and welfare state retrenchment threaten to reverse the gender equality progress made in the years building up to the crisis. We conclude with recommendations for alternative, gender-sensitive policies in response to future crises as well a discussion on the role of gender bias across welfare regimes in the context of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.