Care to reform: what role for gender equality in NGEU?

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically revealed the reliance of contemporary societies on care labour, as well as the asymmetric distribution of the burden of care across genders. The disruption of public care services entailed by COVID-19 containment measures forced women to either reduce their working hours or resign, negatively affecting the progress towards a more gender equal society. The relationship between care and gender equality has been discussed at length within welfare scholarship. Specifically, feminist accounts have emphasized the role of social policy in determining care arrangements, thus either reinforcing or dismantling the gender differences that they bring about. In this context, the European responses to the pandemic through the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) created a new momentum to address the gender dimension of EU social policies that the pandemic made more visible and pressing. Starting from these premises, this paper explores the integration of a gender dimension within the policy design of the NGEU plan through a specific focus on care policies. The paper is comprised of two sections. A first part retraces the relationship between women’s descriptive and substantive representation in the process of drafting the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) Regulation. By doing so, it assesses the correlation between the participation of women to the process of policy formulation and the incorporation of women’s group interests – in this case, women-friendly care policies – into the policy content. It must be noted that women’s descriptive representation is not defined narrowly by looking exclusively at women MEPs. Instead, this paper adopts a broad definition that includes in the analysis the so-called "velvet triangle", the network of feminist eurocrats, feminist experts and women’s movement activists. This approach provides a more accurate depiction of the key actors influencing the policy process. This is evident also in the analysis of women’s substantive representation, that showcases the role of the velvet triangle in integrating a gender perspective into the RRF Regulation. In fact, while no reference to gender equality was present in the first draft of the regulation proposed by the European Commission, the situation was redressed thanks to the intervention of the European Parliament, as well as the advocacy efforts of civil society organisations. Relatedly, care policies are confirmed as one of the main instruments through which gender equality is addressed within NGEU, strongly coded through the lenses of social investment, with its focus on human capital investment and youth. The second section of the paper broadens the scope of analysis to discuss the societal implication of the care arrangement promoted within NGEU. Through the lenses of the social provisioning approach, it outlines the dangers and limits related to a care policy approach guided by a social investment perspective. Two main critical points are identified. On the one hand, the disproportionate attention to activation and employment is not balanced with an equal attention to equality and social cohesion. On the other side, the focus on childcare and education privileges youth as main beneficiary and subject of care policy, vis à vis women.