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Gender, Capitalism and Economic Crisis:Impact and ResponsesClaire Annesley a & Alexandra Scheele ba University of Manchester, UKb Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany

Version of record first published: 18 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Claire Annesley & Alexandra Scheele (2011): Gender, Capitalism and EconomicCrisis: Impact and Responses, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 19:3, 335-347

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Gender, Capitalism and Economic Crisis:Impact and Responses

CLAIRE ANNESLEYa,* & ALEXANDRA SCHEELEb

aUniversity of Manchester, UK, bHumboldt-University of Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT The economic crisis is gendered in terms of its causes, impact and responses. A feministcritique of the recent economic crisis highlights the contributory role played by the dominantmasculine norms entrenched in capitalism and a lack of women and (gender-) democracy withinwork organisations. This article reviews and takes forward the feminist critique of causes of thecapitalist crisis and its subsequent gendered impact, particularly in terms of employment. It providesa gendered interdisciplinary analysis of the crisis by means of empirical examples from the UnitedKingdom and Germany. It assesses whether states’ responses to the crisis have re-gendered theorganisation of capitalism in Europe and shows that policy reforms and budgetary responses havefailed to improve gender equality. At best they perpetuate existing gender equalities; at worst theyhave led to a reversal of gender equality gains.

KEY WORDS: economic crisis, capitalism, gender, UK, Germany

Introduction

The breakdown of the US-American Bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008 marked

the ‘official’ beginning of a continuing crisis of the finance sector and the economy.

From the start, journalists and an increasing number of—mainly feminist—researchers

started to ask whether this crisis is gendered both in terms of its causes and effects as well

as regarding the main actors involved in the finance sector and in financial and political

decision making.

Initially, speculative comments were made on the link between the level of testosterone

and the tendency to risk taking among those who gamble at the stock-markets, about

this being a ‘He-cession’ which ultimately marked the end of men’s dominance in the

economic and political world (Salam, 2009; Rosin, 2010). More recently, detailed

analyses have been produced which reveal the gendered dimensions to the recession’s

deep structure and wide-reaching effects. For example, several authors have used gender

as a category to understand the genesis, the course and the outcomes of the crisis

(Dutting, 2010; Erbe & Neusuß, 2009; Scheele, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Walby, 2009;

Wichterich, 2010). From these studies it is clear that a gender perspective allows a broader

analysis of the economic and political events of recent years and offers a different

1478-2804 Print/1478-2790 Online/11/030335-13 q 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2011.610604

*Correspondence Address: Politics, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL,

UK. Email: claire.annesley@manchester.ac.uk

Journal of Contemporary European StudiesVol. 19, No. 3, 335–347, September 2011

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perspective on the subsequent constraints and opportunities as political economies deal

with the crisis.

This paper reviews and takes forward the feminist critique of causes of the capitalist

crisis and its subsequent gendered impact. It analyses whether states’ responses to the

crisis have re-gendered the organisation of capitalism in Europe, whether regulatory

reforms and budgetary responses improve gender equality, mean ‘business as usual’ or

lead to a reversal of gender equality gains, particularly in the labour market. It provides a

gendered interdisciplinary analysis of the crisis by means of empirical examples from the

United Kingdom and Germany.

The Causes of the Capitalist Crisis: A Feminist Critique

A feminist critique of the recent economic crisis highlights the contributory role played

by the dominance of men and masculine norms entrenched in capitalist institutions

(Honegger et al., 2010; Wichterich, 2010). Thereby the neo-liberal ideal of the

‘homo oeconomicus’ neglects the mutual dependence between actors, and the male

dominance and masculine macho culture in the finance sector holds reckless decision

making and risk in a higher regard than responsibility (Habermann, 2008; Momaya, 2008).

It criticises the lack of women in management positions and weak (gender-) democracy

within work organisations, and raises the contested question of whether a crisis might have

been averted if more women had held leading positions of large investment banks or in

regulating bodies. Although this critique at first glance faces the problem that it might

reproduce essentialist ideas about femininity and masculinities, it is worth taking a closer

look at the relevancy of gender in decision-making positions and at the vulnerabilities of

particular forms of masculinity.

Do Women Make a Difference? Women in Decision-Making Positions

The question of whether the crisis could have been avoided by the presence of more

women in the financial institutions that caused the crisis women is a contested question

which mirrors debates in research on the presence of women in politics (Phillips, 1995;

Lovenduski, 2005). There, the links between the numbers of women (descriptive

representation) and their impact on outcomes (substantive representation) have been

analysed on at least five different levels:

(1) how numbers affect when and whether women do act for women, (2) how political

contexts and parliamentary dynamics influence women’s legislative behaviour, (3)

how identities and interests inform the legislative process, (4) whether women pursue

women’s interests or prioritize women’s issues once they reach political office, and

(5) whether women have an impact on the policy-making process. (Childs & Krook,

2008, p. 21)

The connection between being female (or male) and showing a particular gender

consciousness or interest (or even a particular behaviour) is a crucial question which

cannot easily be proved but should nevertheless be reflected upon. Regardless of the

difficulties of measuring the effects of female representation in leading political or

economic positions, it is important that the critique of the crisis has ‘turned a spot-light

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on the low or even non-existent female representation in top-positions of financial

institutions, and also in the decision making bodies of key regulatory institutions, central

banks and formal and informal networks’ (Young & Schuberth, 2010, p. 1).

In the UK, only 12.5 per cent of FTSE 100 directors are women (Davies, 2011, p. 11),

and 21 per cent of the FTSE 100 have boards which are exclusively male (Vinnicombe

et al., 2010, p. 8). While the numbers of women on boards has doubled since 1999, this

progress has stalled since 2008. The percentage of women among new appointments

to FTSE 100 boards was just 11 per cent in 2008 and 13.3 per cent in 2010, leading to

concerns that ‘at the current rate of change it will take over 70 years to achieve gender-

balanced boardrooms in the UK’ (Davies, 2011, p. 3). In 2009 the annual Female FTSE

Index raised a particular concern about the absence of women on the boards of banks. The

review found that within the banks among the FTSE 100 companies just 9.3 per cent of

board members were female and that the numbers of women had gone down significantly

from 12.8 per cent in 2004 (Sealy et al., 2009).

In Germany women represent only 21 of 833 members of management boards in the

Top-200 German companies, a share of 2.5 per cent. The situation in supervisory boards is

slightly better with a share of female representation in the Top-200 companies of nearly

10 per cent. This can be explained by the co-determination act (Mitbestimmungsgesetz,

MitbestG) which regulates that the share of women and men in supervisory boards should

represent the gender proportion among employees. Thus women are mainly delegated by

the employees’ representation—and not from the side of company owners or employers.

The figures for the finance sector are similar to those—with a share of 2.6 per cent women

in the management boards of the 100 largest banks and saving banks and 2.8 per cent in

insurance companies. However, with 16.8 per cent the share of women in the supervisory

boards in the finance sector is higher than in the Top-200 companies, where the female

share is about 10 per cent. While the number of women in management positions is

quite low, much more than a half of all employees (61.2 per cent) in the finance and

insurance sector are female (Holst & Wiemer, 2010).

This phenomenon of vertical segregation has been closely analysed in feminist labour

market research. Several analyses have shown that the so-called ‘glass-ceiling effect’,

defined by the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission as invisible, artificial barriers that

prevent qualified individuals from advancing within their organisation and reaching full

potential, is caused by poor conditions for the reconciliation of a professional career with

family duties, a working culture which promotes long working hours, by missing role

models (i.e. other women or mothers who have ‘made it’), by gender stereotypes and

patterns which lead to the (self-)exclusion of women and by existing informal networks.

In contrast, other researchers (Hofbauer, 2004, p. 45) have emphasised that access to

opportunities is much more flexible than the ceiling metaphor suggests. They argue that

processes of opening and closure are in fact unobtrusive most of the time, as they are the

outcome of many decisions and practices that make use of the gender criterion without

raising the topic at all. In contrast to earlier times, modern assessment barriers therefore

have a more informal character, and emerge in concrete work (inter)actions. One can say

that they are often embedded into processes of de-gendering and neutralisation of gender,

and thereby become part of a history of gendering, which has generated the current

traditional structures of gender separation and the gendered division of labour.

In this context it is important to make sense of the mechanism of discrimination,

gendered organisations (Acker, 1991) and coalitions of men which hinder women from

Gender, Capitalism and Economic Crisis 337

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entering higher positions. At the same time it is important to reflect on whether gender

equality measures such as Gender Mainstreaming, women quotas or work–life balance

policies to facilitate the reconciliation of work and family life are enough to address

women’s under-representation. At first, the absence of women is criticised for the lack of

gender democracy, yet a more general critique of the capitalist economy highlights the

underlying dominant masculine norms entrenched in capitalism.

‘It’s a Men’s World’—Interdependencies between Capitalism and Patriarchy

The main principles of capitalism—acquisition, profit and innovation—are, regardless of

content, focused on infinite expansion, on growth and enrichment. These aspects explain

why the capitalist economy has been detached from the ‘real’ economy and moved into the

financial sector where virtual capital and its multiplication allow new opportunities for

profit (Bockenforde, 2009). Several studies (e.g. Connell, 2010; Honegger et al., 2010) of

the financial sector show a quite heterogeneous picture of this sector. On the one hand one

finds the sphere of investment bankers which seem to be a parallel universe to the real

world, and on the other hand there is the sphere of private bankers who present the old-

fashioned type of a banker who defines him/herself as a customer adviser (Honegger,

2010, p. 29). Since it was the investment bankers who were held responsible for the crisis,

it is interesting to consider—similar to the question why there are so few women in

management positions in general and in the financial sector in particular—whether the

maleness of these positions and sectors supports a specific way of decision making which

leads to specific outcomes.

Research from masculinity studies (Connell, 1995; Bourdieu, 1997; Meuser, 2009)

provides deep insights regarding these questions. Connell develops the concept of

hegemonic masculinity to analyse the functionality of masculine dominance and to

analyse which patterns of masculinity are culturally hegemonic in different societies.

The framework within hegemonic masculinity is constituted by at least two major

developments: first the establishment of the capitalist civil society and a social order based

on gender differentiation and heteronormativity and second, the division in public and

private sphere on the basis of this gender differentiation (Meuser, 2009, p. 251). Connell

recognises top-management—along with the mass media—as the dominant institution for

hegemonic masculinity. Her study about the financial sector in Australia (Connell, 2010)

shows that only few men (and a very small number of women) can reach leading positions,

and these few are characterised by a distinct modernised patriarchal masculinity—marked

by authority, heterosexual marriage combined with a male bread-winner model and an

instrumental understanding of their work. It becomes clear that the ideal banker is

constructed as an independent person without caring responsibilities and who is willing to

perform the practices which represent entrepreneurial masculinities.

Using his ethnographic research on the Kabyle peoples and society in Algeria in the

1950s, Bourdieu analyses how gender differences and gender hierarchies are reproduced

and how masculine domination works. Bourdieu (1997) argues that the Kabyle society is

an interesting case for this analysis since gender differentiation there is not the only social

differentiation, but it is also marked by a strong symbolic polarisation regarding gender

practices. He shows that individuals internalise the existing gender dominances and

hierarchies and form a gender specific habitus which helps to reproduce the status quo.

The incorporation of difference is thereby an important factor. According to Bourdieu,

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the male habitus is constructed and perfected in connection with social space exclusively

for men. Men are inclined and able to enter into the serious social games most conducive

to the development of ‘manliness’ such as politics, business, science and—arguably

also—sports (Worsching, 2007). Bourdieu makes the case that men’s libido is socially

constituted as libido dominandi, a desire to dominate other men and—secondly as an

instrument of symbolic fight—women. In this concept, women are assigned the part of the

audience—and do not participate in the game (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 203).

Following this idea, the broad exclusion of women in the sphere of the top-management

positions in the financial sector and especially among investment bankers allows men to play

their power game unencumbered by women who might challenge routines and competitions.

This game assumes a shape of reckless profiling of a few, building up and keeping alive

hierarchies and resistance against criticism—Honegger (2010, p. 165) calls this ‘prestige

Darwinism’. Further, these games might—in connection with the dominant capitalist

principles of employment, innovation and profit—lead to pervert the effects, since capitalist

interests often have no intention with regards to content, but are oriented at unlimited

expansion of growth and profit. Therefore it is not surprising that financial trade aims at the

increase of virtual capital, since this is the logic of a capitalist economy. However—and this

is what has caused the crisis—the game leads to a situation where the trade with virtual goods

is disconnected from the real economic conditions (Bockenforde, 2009).

At the same time, it is necessary to keep in mind the ways globalisation and the

re-structuring of economy affect the masculine ideal. Some authors (Kreisky, 2001;

Meuser, 2009) argue that the decline of old industries or the transformation of workplaces

from manual to more knowledge-oriented tasks, have a strong influence on masculinity or

are indeed leading to a crisis of masculinities. Following this idea, the smart business and

finance employees have replaced muscular working men. By this, the hierarchies between

men—between modern and un-modern employees, globalisation winners and losers or

between high and low income owners—become more virulent, with the effect that

many men find themselves in precarious situations which are nothing new for women

(Kreisky, 2001). This development might be the reason that ‘gender’ has become such a

topic in mainstream newspaper, journals and business magazines with the beginning of the

crisis. To blame men for the financial and economic crisis can be explained—as shown

above—with the factual dominance of men in the finance sector, but it has become obvious

that something more was negotiated in the public discourse: the vulnerability of

masculinity. Thus the crisis of these quintessentially male capitalist institutions has led

some commentators to equate this crisis with the ‘death of macho’ (Salam, 2009) or the

‘end of men’ (Rosin, 2010). Yet state responses and employment consequences have been

far from harsh on the men responsible for the crisis. In contrast, it appears that the

vulnerability of the male breadwinner suddenly has become visible and has been used

to legitimate governmental crisis intervention and the increase of debts—and that in a

manner of speaking, as a side-effect, the burden of the impact has fallen on women.

This can be shown through the empirical examples of Germany and the UK.

State Responses to the Crisis

The gendered impact of the crisis can be assessed in two ways: by assessing the gendered

impact of ‘policy measures undertaken at the national and at the EU levels to approach

the economic and social effects of the crisis’ (Young & Schuberth, 2010, p. v) and the

Gender, Capitalism and Economic Crisis 339

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impact on employment levels. First we analyse the gendered implications of the two

governments’ responses to the crisis, to see whether regulatory reforms and budgetary

responses improve gender equality, mean ‘business as usual’ or lead to a reversal of gender

equality gains.

Germany

In Germany, the focus of the media and politics in autumn 2008 was on the financial sector

and the industrial sector, particularly car manufacturing. This attention can be explained

by the fact that these two sectors, which are closely linked together, were expected to be

disproportionately affected by the crisis. It was expected that the car industry would

experience a fall in turnover of 225 per cent and a decrease of employment by 6 per cent.

Similar developments were expected for telecommunications and—to a lesser degree—

the construction industry.

To combat the financial crisis, the German government provided guarantees for the

bank industry and the federal state took over single shares. To combat the economic crisis

the Government focused their financial support on these industries which were to be highly

affected by the crisis—the car industries and their suppliers and—by providing a

stimulation programme the construction industry. The industrial sector could also profit

from labour policy measures such as the extension of short-time work benefits from 12 to

18 months, while other areas such as health services or the retail trade have rarely used

short-time work to avoid unemployment for their staff. Although this regulation was not

explicitly meant to support the car manufacturing industries, it is this sector in which this

instrument had already been used before.

Therefore it is not surprising that the share of men in short-time work was 78 per cent,

while a noticeably smaller number of women (22 per cent) were working short-time.

This example shows the gendered nature of intervention tools. Short-time is by definition

for full-time workers, and these are disproportionately male. Instead, a high majority of

women in Germany work part-time—so they do work short-time, but they are not getting

paid for it. Thus, a gender-neutral tool in a gender-unequal situation is stabilising gender

inequalities. To sum up, male sectors were directly and indirectly more affected by the

Government’s stimulus programmes and related labour market policies.

Both economic stimulus programmes (2008 and 2009) and the law to speed up

economic growth (2009) agreed on expenses of about 86.8 billion euro. argue that the

composition of these expenses has no sustainable effect, since only a small share is used

for public investments, although they entail more perspectives for economic growth and

employment. More than half of these expenses is related to tax cuts with which companies

and higher income earners are favoured—and among the latter group the proportion of

women is only 15 per cent. Against the background of these figures one has to ask why

there has been no gender budgeting which would allow a gender-oriented resources

analysis.

United Kingdom

The UK’s response to the crisis needs to be analysed in two stages. The initial response

from the New Labour government under Prime Minister Gordon Brown was to provide

emergency financial support to failing banks, injecting significant sums of money into the

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banking system and taking some banks into state ownership. Banks were also subjected to

new instruments of financial regulation, including an agreement on executive pay and

dividends (Hodson & Mabbett, 2009). The effect of these measures was gendered in two

ways. Firstly, they offered support for the masculine institutions which triggered the crisis

in the first place without any demand for a reconfiguration of the gendered practices and

norms of the banking system, such as the excessive bonus culture which encourages risk

taking. Secondly, these measures significantly raised levels of public debt, which has had

strong knock-on consequences for gender equality. Following the change of government

in May 2010 to a Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition the budgetary, policy and

regulatory response has taken a different tack. Motivated by its priority to bring down

public debt, the Coalition government has announced a series of cuts to welfare spending

and public service provision which, independent analysis has shown, have

disproportionately impacted on women rather than men (Cooper, 2010; Women’s Budget

Group, 2010a, 2010b, 2011b).

A gender audit of the June 2010 Emergency Budget, conducted by the House of

Commons Library, found that of the £8bn net revenue to be raised by the financial year

2014–2015, nearly £6bn will be from women, in contrast to just over £2bn from men

(Cooper, 2010). In addition, women have taken a direct and indirect hit in terms of welfare

benefits. The June 2010 Emergency Budget scrapped the universal Health in Pregnancy

Grant and the means-tested Sure Start Maternity Grant for second and subsequent children

and a later announcement proposed to ‘claw back’ Child Benefit, a universal benefit

normally paid to mothers, from households where one person is a higher-rate tax-payer.

Other cuts to welfare spending have been implemented or proposed by capping the amount

that can be claimed, reducing the value of benefits or reducing eligibility. Many of these

affect women more than men because a larger proportion of women’s income comes from

benefits either because they are more prone to poverty or because they have caring

responsibilities (Women’s Budget Group, 2010a, 2010b).

Further, analysis of the October 2010 Spending Review conducted by the UK Women’s

Budget Group (WBG, 2010b) found that the anticipated cuts in public services would

affect women more significantly than men for two reasons. Firstly, women are to be

disproportionately affected by cuts to public services because they make more use of

public services than do men both for themselves and for the people they care for. The

WBG’s analysis, produced in collaboration with the economist Howard Reed, found

that lone parents and single pensioners, the majority of whom are women, would be

particularly harshly affected, losing services worth 18.5 per cent and 12 per cent of their

incomes respectively (WBG, 2010b). Secondly, more women than men are employed in

the public sector, and so the majority of the predicted 50,000 job losses will fall on them.

The WBG also found that the jobs in the sectors ‘protected’ from cuts were worse in terms

of pay, meaning that women’s employment conditions were set to deteriorate

(WBG, 2010b). It is also the case that the gender pay-gap and employment conditions

for women are poorer in private sector jobs which, as the Government anticipates, will

replace public sector employment.

Advocates of gender equality remain sceptical that women will benefit from any

increase in the supply of jobs in the private sector for three reasons. Child care subsidies

have been cut (WBG, 2010b), the Government is embarking on a process of deregulation

which has already affected employment rights upon which women rely and threatens

many more (WBG, 2011b) and the Government is openly at ease with a return to a

Gender, Capitalism and Economic Crisis 341

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‘male breadwinner, female carer model’ of the welfare state. For example, the proposed

reform which brings out-of-work, in-work and housing benefits together to form the so-

called Universal Credit, aims to increase the incentive of getting one person per household

into employment (Department for Work and Pensions, 2011). Assessments of this proposal

are united in their analysis that the impact of Universal Credit will weaken the disincentive

for second earners, usually the women, to take unemployment (Brewer et al., 2011; WBG,

2011a). But the Government considers this to be ‘justified’ (Department of Work and

Pensions, 2011, p. 19). In sum, the economic decisions taken by the Coalition so far have

had the cumulative effect of halting or even reversing progress towards gender equality in

terms of women’s independent incomes and women’s equal access to quality employment.

Effects on the Labour Market by Gender

A final feminist assessment of the crisis exposes the disproportionate impact of the

economic crisis on women in the labour market, which is highly gender-segregated

regarding sectors, positions and occupational status. Across the EU women and men were

affected differently by the rise in unemployment which followed the crisis (Smith, 2009).

The initial impact of the recession led to more men than women losing jobs. In 2009, in the

EU-27 the male unemployment rate rose by 2.5 per cent to 9.5 per cent and was above that

of the female rate which rose by 1.6 per cent to 9.2 per cent (Young & Schuberth, 2010,

p. v). In its 2010 annual report on Employment in Europe, the European Commission

summarised the situation in this way:

Males, the young, migrants, the low-skilled and those with a short-term contract

have been most affected by the economic downturn and the rise in unemployment.

Apart from men, all of these are traditionally amongst the most disadvantaged

groups in the labour market, and the current downturn has made their relative

situation even worse, increasing the risk of long-term unemployment and

detachment from the labour market. (European Commission, 2010, p. 10)

Figures show that in the second quarter of 2010 employment in the EU was 5.6 million

lower than in the second quarter of 2008 (European Commission, 2010). Most research

assumes that this difference is temporary since men work more often in the industrial

sectors which were—as mentioned above—affected by the break-down in the economy.

Due to the fact that those employment sectors where most women work (retail sector,

health and education) are highly dependent to the overall economic development on the

one hand and on public spending on the other hand, it has been expected that a lot more

female employees will lose their jobs later, that is, when the states’ fiscal consolidation

measures kick in. In addition, as Sylvia Walby (2009, p. 9) points out, the economic crisis

might lead to a decline in real wages and a shift in the composition of employment away

from formal employment into the informal sector and subsistence agriculture and also

household production.

However, the figures from 2010 showed an expansion in employment in France,

Germany, Poland and the UK in the second quarter of 2010 (European Commission, 2010,

p. 25). In Germany, currently one can gain the impression that the economic crisis belongs

to the past. This is because all economic figures are presenting a positive image. In October

2010 the leading institutes for economic research published the annual autumn survey

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report evaluating the current and the prospective economic development in Germany.

According to this, Germany is in a stable economic boom. In 2010, the GDP was

3.6 per cent, and in 2011 it is expected to be about 2.0 per cent. The labour market is

providing increasing job opportunities with the effect that in 2010 the average

unemployment was about 3,238,421, and in 2011 it is expected that the average number

will decrease below the three million threshold (although it was above three million in the

first four months of the year). This corresponds to an unemployment rate of 7.7 per cent in

2010, and thereby a level which was measured last in 1992 during the peak of the

economic boom resulting from German unification. Finally the report mentions wage

increases of 2.8 per cent, a low increase of prices and a downturn of deficit financing.

An analysis of data on employment status and unemployment by gender draws an

ambivalent picture of the German situation: on the one hand, we notice an increase of

(social insurance) employment for women and men since 2005, when it was at the lowest

level (26,178,266) since German unification (Bundesagentur fur Arbeit, 2011, p. 36).

This increase slightly declined in 2009, but recovered in 2010 with 27.7 million

employees. On the other hand, the increase of part-time work (plus 3.6 per cent compared

to 2009) was much higher than the increase of full-time work (plus 0.6 per cent

compared to 2009) (Bundesagentur fur Arbeit, 2011, p. 3). Considering that the share of

women among all part-time workers is about 75 per cent, the fact that the job losses for

women at the beginning of the crisis were quite low and that their employment is still

rising, one has to take a closer look at the working conditions—comparing conditions

between women and men as well as between those sectors which are now recovering (e.g.

manufacturing) and those which are still signifiers of the structural change of the economy,

namely the service sector. Including the unemployment situation into the analysis

emphasises this ambivalence: in 2010, the level of men’s unemployment is still above the

level of women, though men profited slightly more from the annual average decline of

unemployment than women. While—compared to 2009—women’s unemployment

declined by 5 per cent to a total of 1,479,000, men’s unemployment figures fell by

6 per cent to a total of 1,760,000. This corresponds with a female unemployment rate of

7.5 per cent and a men’s unemployment rate of 7.9 per cent. However, the Federal Office

for Labour points out that over the course of the year, the labour market development for

men was considerably more favourable to men than for women, since their unemployment

figures dropped by 10 per cent between December 2009 and December 2010, while the

decline of women’s unemployment was only 6 per cent. While men were more affected by

the economic crisis than women, they benefit much more from the economic boom

(Bundesagentur fur Arbeit, 2011, p. 7). Although it is not clear whether this trend will

continue to the next turn of the year, one can interpret it as an indicator for the gender-

imbalance of the fiscal and policy responses critiqued above.

In the UK, unemployment is also starting to fall from a post-recession peak in 2010.

Data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in May 2011 put the rate of

unemployment at 7.7 per cent for the January–March 2011 quarter. This was down from 8

per cent in the same quarter of the previous year (ONS, 2011). However, when

disaggregated by gender, a worrying trend emerges. While men’s unemployment is still

higher than women’s, it fell in the year 2010–2011 from 9.1 per cent to 8.4 per cent while

women’s unemployment rose from 6.7 per cent to 7 per cent. Similarly, the number of male

claimants of Job Seeker’s Allowance fell for fourteen consecutive months to March 2011,

while the number of female claimants rose for nine months in a row (Wearden, 2011).

Gender, Capitalism and Economic Crisis 343

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For Harris (2011), this is the combined consequence of job cuts in the public sector, a

smaller increase in retail vacancies compared with manufacturing and a new obligation on

lone parents to seek employment once their child is 5 rather than 7. In short, the UK

Coalition government’s recovery plan, with severe cuts in public spending and jobs and a

stronger reliance on the private sector, does not appear to be delivering the same

opportunities for men and women.

Conclusion

The economic crisis is gendered in terms of its causes, impact and responses. At the time

of the financial crash, there was intense speculation about whether the crisis had opened

up a window of opportunity for decision makers to reform the masculine and macho

institutional cultures which were held responsible for the crisis (Momaya, 2008;

Ertel, 2009) as well as to reflect on broader issues regarding the gendered division of

labour, ecological issues and limits of growth. However, it proved impossible to use the

crisis as an opportunity to improve gender equality in financial institutions, both in terms

of presence and impact. In the UK, the presence of women in the boards of the major banks

has gone down instead of up since the financial collapse, and political actors have

proceeded to keep the existing system alive by providing credits, offering securities and

supporting industries.

While the initial speculation was that the impact of the recession would hit men more

than women (Salam, 2009; Rosin, 2010), the gendered effect has in fact been the exact

opposite. As early as September 2009 the European Women’s Lobby, the largest

federation of women’s organisations in Europe, called on political actors to recognise

the outcome of the crisis on women and to make a gender assessment of the initiated

policy approaches to meet the crisis (EWL, 2009). The organisation criticised the way the

political and economic measures adopted so far followed a ‘business-as-usual’ logic,

which would disadvantage women and men—now and in future generations.

Our analysis of the UK and German governments’ fiscal and policy responses to the

crisis demonstrates that gender equality was clearly not a consideration. Their decisions

were not subject to gender budgetary analysis in order to ensure that the costs and impacts

of their measures were evenly distributed. In the German case, male occupational sectors

were directly and indirectly more affected by the Government’s stimulus programmes and

related labour market policies. In other words, the Government’s ‘business-as-usual’

gender neutral response was layered onto a gender unequal situation which had the effect

of stabilising gender inequalities. In the UK, however, the lack of adequate gender

budgeting in the context of deep cuts to public spending has not had the effect of stabilising

existing gender inequalities but rather has triggered a dramatic reversal of gender equality

gains made in recent years.

The perpetuation or deepening of gender inequalities is most visible in unemployment

trends in the UK and Germany. The prediction that public sector jobs will be replaced

by opportunities in the private sector is not borne out by the evidence. The fact that

unemployment rates are rising for women and falling for men demonstrates who is

benefitting from the economic recovery.

The feminist issue now has to turn from managing the crisis to shaping the economic

recovery. Of central concern here are the representation and participation of women in

decision-making processes and a critique of policy measures which obviously benefit men

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rather than women. On the first point, the minimal presence of women/feminists in the UK

Coalition government may form part of the explanation for its gender adverse response to

the economic crisis and disregard of the duty to consider gender equality in economic

decision making. On the second point, we should follow the assumption that the

formulation of problems determines the scope of solutions of problems. Although it is

important to analyse gender differences in relation to unemployment, this is not sufficient.

Considering that the type of women’s paid work, their working times, income and savings

differ so significantly from men’s, and since it is still women who do most of the unpaid

work because they are more often than men responsible for the household, child and

elderly care, a much more fundamental feminist analysis of the economic recovery

is required.

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