In recent years EU institutions have explicitly developed and disseminated discourses that frame gender equality in terms of economic benefits. This shift is part of a global turn toward neoliberalized discourses focused on economic growth and efficiency. This paper provides a critical look at recent studies commissioned by EU institutions that underpin arguments about the economic benefits of gender equality. While much of the critical research on economic arguments for gender equality has focused on the shifting understandings of gender equality or the way these arguments support neoliberal economic policies, I am interested in how and to what effect processes of economization have transformed gender knowledge and expertise that underpins policy-making. Theoretically, the paper aims at providing new analytical tools for understanding what is at stake, when gender equality is increasingly framed in terms and economic growth and competitiveness. I argue that analyzing economized gender equality discourses requires combining Foucauldian analysis of neoliberalism as the extension of economic priorities, values, knowledge and practices with feminist political economy that makes visible how these priorities, values, knowledge and practices are gendered. To bring these two perspectives together, I develop the notion of gendered/ing economization.
