Prospects for Gender Equality in the Changing World Order: Perspectives from the Global North
Chair(s): Stephanie Barrientos (University of Manchester)
This session draws on papers from an upcoming book* and related projects to consider the prospects for gender equality in the changing world order. This edited volume explores the impact on gender equality of the recent series of cumulative crises, from banking to state finances to health and the cost of living and, more importantly for this discussion, how far positive gender equality trends will survive major but yet to be realised transitions in the organisation of both wage work (digital, green) and social reproduction. This session is being designed just as the world reals from the backlash against gender equality, already evident in political changes within some European countries but dramatically strengthened by United States’ government actions against a wide range of gender equality initiatives. Thus we add reflections on how far the project of progressing gender equality is dependent upon the political climate and support for the notion of promoting goals of diversity and equality.
Although neoliberal capitalism has endorsed gender equality in its rhetoric and to some extent in policy, it has far from fully embedded it into its institutions and market operations. Therefore, not only do huge gender gaps remain but the built-in protections, as hoped for by the call, from the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women onwards, for gender mainstreaming of all policy, have not been established. This leaves even current achievements in gender equality exposed to both ongoing processes of employment restructuring and to the potential for major backlash against efforts to weaken the influence of patriarchy. Against this background, we identify three major in-process transitions that pose major challenges to work, employment and life conditions for both men and women. These are the moves towards an employment system transformed both by AI and digitalisation and by the pursuit of sustainability and net zero, alongside the pressing issue of how to change a social reproduction system that can no longer rely on family-based care to free labour for capital. We interrogate the implications of these transitions for the longer term prospects for gender equality, paying particular attention to the need to mainstream gender perspectives into the policies and practices shaping these transitions. A further theme here is whether one underlying problem for gender equality has been a tendency to focus on progress for women on average and to pay less attention to those not benefitting from the upgrading of employment opportunities and job quality over recent decades. Therefore, bringing forward an intersectional perspective to the foreground remains crucial for understanding the effects of turbulence on existing and emerging gendered patterns of inequality and vulnerability.
We find more evidence that gender is influencing approaches to social reproduction at least at the EU level in its emerging efforts to promote defamalialisation and degendering of care responsibilities in its policy programmes, although the return to strict fiscal rules and the rise of far-right forces cast a shadow of uncertainty in future developments. In turn, approaches to AI and digitalisation and to net zero are more gender blind and may serve to reinforce rather than change essentialist notions of the role of women in employment. This means that gender mainstreaming is insufficiently embedded in the processes of policy decision-making that is shaping the future world order.
The session is organised as follows: the first paper (Piasna) considers the impact of digitalisation, specifically on remote working, for men and women and points to the contradictory impacts for gender equality even of this apparently progressive development; the second paper (Daly et al.) surveys the current debates and policies pursued to meet net zero objectives and points to the dangers of gender essentialism, the focus on protecting displaced male labour rather than on investment in low carbon female-dominated sectors and the neglect of effects of changes in consumption patterns on the scale (and gender division) of non-wage work; the third paper (Karamessini) considers the recent trends from austerity to the social turn in EU policy that have promoted policies of defamilialisation and degendering of care. These changes may, however, again be put into question by the EU’s new fiscal constraints and the right-wing turns in many EU member states. The final paper (Sanchez-Mira et al.) draws on the concluding chapter to the volume to both review the evidence on change and continuity in the gender, family and employment systems across the various crises at household, labour market and societal systems levels and to consider what lies ahead in relation to the continuing impacts of transitions, potentially exacerbated by the political U-turns in support for gender equality as a public good for citizens, firms and economies, as presented in international institutions such as the World Economic Forum, the ILO, the OECD over recent decades.
*Rubery, J., Sánchez-Mira, N. and Insarauto, V. 2026 Women in Turbulent Times: Crises, Transitions and Challenges for Gender Equality Routledge.
Presentations of the Special Session
Digitalisation and Remote Work: Gendered Outcomes in Job Quality and the Impact of Persistent Gender Inequalities in Paid and Unpaid Work
Agnieszka Piasna
ETUI, Brussels
The study aims to contribute to the debate on the interaction between technological change and persistent gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work, by exploring the challenges posed to job quality by remote work from home (encompassing telework and online platform work) in the European context. The investigation examines the opportunities and risks of remote work for progress towards gender equality in both paid and unpaid work, utilising large-scale cross-national survey data. It examines gender differences in the uptake of remote work and the role of parental status and gender differences in job quality, including working-time quality, family-to-work conflict and career prospects and opportunities. The findings reveal that the impact of digitalization, which enhances temporal and spatial work flexibility, materializes differently for men and women, and it is particularly mothers of young children who face significant challenges and trade-offs in relation to different aspects of job quality compared to men.
Unpacking the Green Economy: Worker Justice without Gender Justice?
Jack Daly, Vera Trappman, Ioulia Bessa, Jennifer Tomlinson
Leeds University Business School
The climate crisis represents one of humankind's greatest crises, demanding transformational change for economies and societies alike. Yet the transition to decarbonised economies, as currently conceptualised, is relatively gender-blind and thus risks reinforcing existing intersectional inequalities. In reviewing academic literature and the UK and EU’s existing green economy policies, current strategies are shown to be concerned solely with protecting job losses in male-dominated sectors rather than harnessing the potential for the green transition to invest in already low-carbon, female-dominated sectors such as social care. Concurrently, existing policies on job creation, job protection and reskilling risk ringfencing employment in the green economy in the already male-dominated workforce due to existing barriers to entry and retention challenges for women. We argue that ensuring that feminist voices are included in any green transition policies at the point of conception could provide the opportunity for a truly inclusive transition to a green economy.
The “Care Transition” in Turbulent Times
Maria Karamessini
Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
Notwithstanding important national variations, since the 1980s all care regimes of economically advanced countries have undergone the “care transition”: characterized by the defamilialisation of child and elderly care and the degenderisation of unpaid care work. While the austerity phase of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily interrupted or reversed the care transition, they also prompted a revival of EU social policy and pushed work-life balance and care policy towards the top of the EU’s social policy agenda priorities in their aftermath.
The paper takes stock of the common trend towards the defamilialisation of care across Europe over recent decades, pinpoints differences in its extent and forms in the fields of childcare and elderly care and provides evidence on the degenderisation of unpaid care. It then examines the extent to which these successive crises have derailed the care transition in Europe and studies recent EU policy developments in the fields of care, work-life balance, and gender equality. It finally discusses the ability of Member States to attain the targets of the new EU Care Strategy, in the coming years given the return to restrictive fiscal policy, the scarcity of resources for social investment due to the turn of the EU to military spending as a matter of strategic priority, restrictive migration policy etc.
Prospects for Gender Equality in the Changing World Order
Nuria Sanchez-Mira1, Jill Rubery2, Valeria Insarauto3
1University of Neuchatel, 2University of Manchester, 3University of Sheffiled
This paper addresses two main themes from the edited-volume contributions. First it reviews the evidence provided on whether successive crises and turbulent times have disrupted, reversed or accelerated trends in the gender division of waged and unwaged work and the gendered reward structure (including intersections by class and migration status). Second it explores the gender equality implications of wider conflicts and unresolved global economic issues including the failures of neoliberal capitalism in both Eastern Europe and America to develop sustainable social reproduction and care systems, the inability of digitally-enabled global work opportunities to empower women in the Global South and the absence of gender mainstreaming in decision-making processes shaping transitions towards net zero and AI/digitalisation-dominated economies. It concludes by reflecting on both the limitations of gender equality gains within neoliberal capitalism and their fragility, as risks of reversals increase under the emergent populist capitalism in both America and Europe.
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