Covid-19: The Place for Women in Pandemic Response and Decision-Making in the EU

• In Event: Gender and Decision-Making

Abstract

The pandemic that has shaken our societies since early 2020 has hit disproportionally women in a variety of domains. Women are overrepresented among essential workers both in the healthcare sector and in areas such as education and childcare. Additionally, closures of services for the young and elderly have shifted back into the household outsourced care responsibilities freeing women to participate in the labour market. Unsurprisingly, the burden has gendered implications as well forcing women to juggle unpaid care while working from home or take a step back from the labour market when not reconcilable. In the absence of corrective measures, the pandemic hence runs the concrete risk of halting and reversing progress for gender equality in recent years. Under such premises, questions remain on (i) the extent to which Covid-19 policy responses across countries have taken into account the gendered implications of the outbreak in crisis management and deployed adequate mitigation factors and (ii) the extent to which gender equality is prioritised in the recovery and post-pandemic reconstruction. To this purpose, the analysis assesses the saliency of gender equality within the policy mix of the EU27 through a mixed methodological approach. On the one hand, it performs a quantitative text analysis of the national recovery and resilience plans (NRRPs) under Next Generation EU (NGEU), on the other, it selects four heterogenous EU Member States to conduct a case-study investigation on how and if gender has shaped different policy responses. The article applies two complementary analytical approaches to examine the evolution and strength of the recovery efforts with regard to gender issues. First, it performs a hybrid quantitative analysis to recover information from NRRPs applying standard text mining techniques, such as keywords analysis and keyword co-occurrence. Then, it extracts and processes data from the 27 National Plans by means of unsupervised machine learning, and it runs a structural topic model (STM) to identify in a systematic manner salient topics on gender emerged from the policy debate. Unlike other standard topic modeling approaches, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), STM introduces the possibility of adding covariates in the form of categorical explanatory variables, exploiting documents metadata (e.g. government political ideology) to explain topic prevalence. By identifying latent topics of interest in the recovery plans, the analysis helps pinpoint the underlying gendered implications of the chosen national reform and investment priorities. Based on the findings, the paper presents a scoreboard of countries' performance in gender salience within the NRPPs highlighting geographical differences across the EU.
Furthermore, in considering in-depth case studies of selected heterogenous Member States, the paper further expands the assessment of the plans quantifying the allocation of funds toward direct policies supporting gender equality (e.g. paternity leave, care services, labour market inclusivity) together with the gendered distributive consequences of sectoral investments, as well as containment and economic measures choices in the early months of the pandemic. Having developed a comparative gendered assessment of the recovery efforts, the analysis considers how the place for women in the Covid-19 response relates to that of women leadership within societies and in pandemic decision-making. Do countries more advanced in the path toward equality perform better? Is that the case for a more substantial involvement of women leadership in crisis-management and decision making with regards to NGEU recovery plans? To this end, the paper carries out a social network and sentiment analysis of the key actors taking part in the debate surrounding the adoption of the draft plans within the Member States, to uncover the extent of the involvement of women leaders and interest groups (e.g. feminist associations) and their influence in shaping the plans. The analysis employs primary data from Twitter concerning the inclusion of gender equality issues in national recovery strategies. It builds networks of actors discussing the national and EU recovery plans and assesses the centrality and influence of female decision-makers and feminist groups in the policy debate.
The contribution of the analysis allows to draw preliminary insights on how a recovery plan with common priorities including gender parity translates into diverse salience of equality across the EU27 at the Member State level and, within some selected Member States, how heterogeneity on the first accounts matches to different level of contribution of women in shaping the pandemic response and reconstruction effort.

Authors

• Antonella Zarra, Hamburg University

• Matilde Ceron, University of Milan