The premise of the strategy is that gender equality is ‘an essential condition for an innovative, competitive and thriving European economy’, which ‘brings more jobs and higher productivity’. This is in line with what has historically driven the EU to legislate on equality between the sexes—the desire not to eradicate inequalities but to optimise the performance of the labour market by ensuring a steady supply of workers. Indeed, one of the key indicators through which the progress towards gender equality in EU member states is measured is the (increasing) proportion of women in the labour market. What this refuses to consider however, are the labour conditions which women are encouraged to enter.
As we have seen in east-central Europe, this experience has been far from emancipatory for many women, as a large proportion of the jobs created in the past three decades have been of poor quality: underpaid, low-skilled, socially undervalued and performed on zero-hours contracts. Kováts and Gregor showed in their research on Hungarian women that broad segments feel so exploited in the labour market that, rather than think how to escape home to do meaningful work and secure financial independence, their main concern is how to escape employment to be with their loved ones. This exposes the hollowness of the commission’s equation of gender equality with more women on the labour market, as at best out of touch and at worst wilfully class-blind. [...]
The narrow neoliberal framework through which the strategy challenges gender inequalities in the supply of care work is also evident in its focus on solving growing demand by encouraging (individual) men to take it up, as well as establishing institutions relieving women of these responsibilities. While both are certainly necessary, they are woefully inadequate to address the deeper underlying tension within capitalist societies—the need for reproductive labour to sustain productive labour, with the associated lack of valorisation and remuneration. Unless we fundamentally restructure ‘worker’ and ‘carer’ roles deemed separate and mutually exclusive, we cannot hope to eradicate this tension, no matter what work-life balance efforts we apply.
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