The Re-Emergence of Childcare as a Women’s Issue? Analyzing Gender in Australian and Canadian COVID-19 Childcare Policymaking

ABSTRACT

Canada and Australia, two liberal welfare states whose market-based ECEC systems consistently rank poorly on international measures, embraced similar short-term childcare policy responses to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: widespread closures, reduced capacity of centers, establishment of publicly funded emergency childcare programs for essential workers, and short-term wage subsidies for essential workers (sometimes including educators). Rooted in a feminist political economy (FPE) theoretical framework and using a what-is-the-problem-represented-to-be (WPR) methodological approach, this article explores the extent to which the first and second “waves” of the COVID-19 pandemic policy responses in Canada and Australia framed childcare as a concern about gendered, reproductive labor within political representations of the policy problems to be solved.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• policy
• pandemic
• gender
• childcare

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2023.2201916.

Notes

1. Bilateral agreements between the provinces/territories and the federal government define the parameters of provincial/federal spending.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brooke Richardson

Brooke Richardson is a care activist and scholar motivated by the belief that good care is foundational to meaningful lives and a democratic society. She is currently an Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Sociology at Brock University (Canada). Her research and scholarly work focus on the privatization of childcare in Canada, political representations of the childcare policy “problem,” reconceptualizing and reasserting care in early childhood education, and reimaging child welfare systems through an ethics of care perspective. She has published and presented nationally and internationally on topics related to caring for children and has recently published two edited volumes: Feminisms and the Early Childhood Educator: Critical Conversations (Bloomsbury) and Mothering on the Edge: A Critical Examination of Mothering within Child Protection Systems (Demeter Press).

Kay Cook

Kay Cook is a Professor and the Associate Dean (Research) for the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology. She is a member of the Australian Government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee and Secretary of the Australian Sociological Association. Her most recent monograph, The Failure of Child Support: Gendered Systems of Inaccessibility, Inaction and Irresponsibility charts the ineffectiveness of child support across 16 countries, finding that it is no longer a feminist intervention, but rather a gendered governance practice that operates to make the system inaccessible, fails to deliver outcomes, and condones fathers’ irresponsible non-compliance.

Rhonda Breitkreuz

Rhonda Breitkreuz is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta, Canada. As a social policy scholar, her research explores the relationship between individuals and the state, focusing particularly on the ways in which specific policies affect wellbeing, gender equality, and access to resources. She is co-editor a forthcoming book, The Economic Empowerment of Women and the State: A Human Ecological Perspective, which explores the enabling and disabling environments for women’s social and economic security in seven countries.

Bin Wu

Bin Wu is a Lecturer at the Department of Education, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. Her research disciplines include the sociology of education, educational history, and philosophy. Her research interest is in cultural diversity—the way that ideas, past and current, affect people’s lives. Her recent research has focused on various issues in neoliberal contexts—wellbeing, social justice in early childhood teacher education, and the concept of care in the formation of pre-service teachers’ professional identity.