Women’s substantive representation and gender mainstreaming in the EU pandemic recovery

RecoverGEU studies if and under which conditions the EU response to the pandemic
promoted gender-sensitive recovery policies. Based on a synthesis of theoretical and
methodological approaches from political economy, EU, gender and policy analysis
RecoverGEU conducts an innovative analysis of EU crisis politics and policies. The
project asks whether and how the effectiveness of gender mainstreaming within the
multilevel governance framework of the EU is moderated domestically by women’s
representation. It thus examines whether women's substantive representation extends
beyond parliamentary debates to (fiscal) policy outcomes in the case of the Covid-19
crisis and the National Recovery and Response Plans. Besides advancing knowledge of
women’s representation, the project makes key methodological contributions: it improves
text-as-data approaches for classifying gender-sensitive policy-relevant content; and it
extends civically engaged research methodologies to the multilevel, multilingual and
cross-country context of EU politics and policies. The pilot on the Covid-19 crisis well
grounds the scaling of the analysis to a major early career grant application on
substantive representation and gender-sensitive crisis responses across the EU and its
multi-level governance.