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Abstract
Adding a gender dimension to the story of the Irish crisis deepens our understanding of crisis and necessary responses. Using gender both as category and process we see clear gendered patterns throughout the Irish crisis including patterns of gender inequality in gendered institutions and changes in the process of gendered agency. Reviewing the extent to which Irish political and public spheres, banking and budgetary processes are gendered raises questions about how this impacts on post crisis outcomes. The gendered lens draws attention to the risks inherent in hyper-masculine institutions and culture and questions whether greater gender balance might alter the risk oriented culture of Irish financial services. It also draws attention to the gendered nature of Irish austerity budgets which disproportionately impacted women, and low income women in particular. The crisis also impacted on feminist agency. Examining women's political agency in the context of the crisis we find examples of defensive agency that sought to protect women's interests from fiscal retrenchment. These exist alongside examples of offensive feminist agency that use the crisis as an opportunity to strengthen gender equality in the political and policy processes. We find the gender infrastructure negatively impacted but despite such damage, we find feminist agency remains crucial to realising gender equality in public and private decision-making and despite the crisis, hopeful signs of renewed feminist agency are present.
Notes
1 http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/gender-decision-making/database/politics/national-parliaments/index_en.htm shows national variations in female representation. Iceland (60% male) and Ireland (85% male) both experienced banking crisis but show a striking variation in gender representation in politics and business. Spain (61% male) has relatively high gender parity, Portugal (71% male) is near the EU 27 average of 74% male as is Greece (79% male), while Cyrus is an outlier with 91% male.
3 Ironically, the circumstances of the nomination process provoked a side debate about the pressures for mothers in politics. http://www.politics.ie/forum/oireachtas/226844-seanad-full-time-job-e-g-susan-okeeffes-absence-john-crowns-many-jobs-3.html.
5 Analysis drawn from budget statements over 2009–2015, http://www.finance.gov.ie/budget, supplemented with analysis, http://www.socialjustice.ie/content/budget-home.