The prevalence of New Public Management practices in global governance has affected gender policies and implementation measures, as the extensive use of indicators to measure progress towards gender equality shows. According to Foucault, indicators and statistics can be considered as neoliberal techniques of power to control populations or states by construing and implementing certain forms of knowledge. The paper seeks to examine the global trend of measurement systems through the example of formally recognising women’s unpaid care and domestic work, which is a central claim of feminist scholars and activists.
My analysis is based on expert interviews with officials from the EU, OECD and different NGOs. It aims to rethink the inscribed gender rationalities of governing techniques and the connection between power and knowledge in the case of recognising reproductive work. Situated in the nexus of feminist state theory and biopolitical governmentality, it highlights the gendered effects of measuring reproductive work. Whereas the ‘politics of numbers’ are widely reflected in the emerging literature of global governmentality studies, they largely ignore the gendered rationalities and implications of global measurement systems. I will make a case for understanding the operationalisation of gender equality policies in quantitative indicator systems as a neoliberal governing technique, which appropriates feminist theory and practice in the process.
