Gender mainstreaming in the post-pandemic reconstruction in the EU: a comparative assessment of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans

Covid-19 has disproportionally affected women, leading to the backsliding of progress toward gender parity. Against the backdrop of a long time commitment to gender mainstreaming in EU policy-making, the commonly financed pandemic reconstruction effort included such a mandate under the auspices of Next Generation EU. At the same time, the domestic design of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans allows for a comparative assessment of the effective saliency of gender parity across the Member States. We exploit the well-defined case of the official documents delineating at the domestic level the National Recovery and Resilience Plans to investigate cross-country heterogeneities. Specifically, we test whether the usual north-south equality divide is confirmed in the case of the investment and reform strategies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We employ a mixed-method approach which complements assessment through text analysis on the corpus of 25 available national plans with qualitative analysis of four case studies to confirm and deepen the quantitative findings. The frequency, dictionary analysis and Structural Topic Modelling confirm limited saliency of gender parity within national recovery investment and reform strategies. Substantial geographical differences emerge. Heterogeneities do not, however, fully align along the north-south fault line. Conversely, pre-pandemic performance in terms of equality - and specifically political representation - is a key cleavage in the prioritisation of gender mainstreaming. Findings offer a warning of limited mitigation of the equality price of the pandemic through the National Recovery and Resilience Plans, especially among the Member States displaying greater gender gaps, to begin with. The contribution of the analysis is twofold. On the empirical level, it evidences the heterogeneous success of the gender mainstreaming mandate of Next Generation EU across the Member States. More broadly, results support the centrality of substantive representation in light of the better performance of those countries which entered the pandemic with more limited gender gaps in the political arena.