Feminism and the new multi-scaling in employment policy

Abstract

In the last decades, employment policy design and implementation partly shifted from the national to local and regional scales in most European countries. In addition, the European Union appeared as an important new actor in this policy field in the late 1990s. We argue that the new geographical multi-scaling of employment policy can be used strategically by feminists to promote different aspects of gender equality simultaneously: Feminist claims related to gender equity, i.e., demands to secure equal participation of women and men in the labour market, should be advocated at the national scale. Claims related to the recognition of gender difference, i.e., demands related to typical female and male employment needs and their social recognition should be promoted at the local scale. The regional scale is the most appropriate one to advance gender plurality, i.e., non-traditional employment of women and men. In the empirical part of the paper we discuss how the ideal leverage of claims at different spatial scales and inter-linkage between scales could operate. We will show that the link to EU policy strengthens feminist claims in the highly gender-differentiated societies and political settings of Austria and Germany.