RESISTIRE D2.2 Summary report on mapping cycle 2

The aim of the present report is, first of all, to understand if and how the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (or equivalent recovery policies in the case of the countries that do not belong to the European Union but are part of the RESISTIRÉ project) address gender inequalities in specific domains (gender-based violence; work and labour market; economy; gender pay and pension gaps; gender care gap; decision-making and politics; environmental justice; health; education), and their intersections with selected inequality grounds (social class/socioeconomic background; age; disability; nationality; ethnicity; religion/belief; sexual orientation; gender identity). In line with the theoretical and conceptual approach of RESISTIRÉ, the report builds on an intersectional approach to gender that acknowledges the mutual shaping of multiple complex inequalities. Secondly, the analysis focuses on the processes that led to the design of these policies to understand the level of involvement of relevant stakeholders. Finally, it examines how civil society reacted both to the content of these policies and to the process by which they were designed.

The empirical data base for this analysis consists of 31 grids (26 related to NRRPs and 5 related to equivalent policies) filled by 30 national researchers representing each country under the lens of RESISTIRÉ. In the grids, specific questions were presented to collect information on the policies, the design processes, and the reactions from civil society. All the data were analysed through a thematic analysis. In addition, when possible, the main author analysed the closed questions from the grids by creating frequency tables and graphs to provide the most relevant contextual data on the mapped policies.

The overall findings of the second cycle of policy mapping are the following:

·       most plans contain some attempts to propose policy measures aimed at mitigating gender+ inequalities, mostly in the area of work, education, and care, while there are big differences between countries in this;

·       in most cases the NRRPs’ gender+ issues are mainly relegated to the level of a general reflection or a description of the context, without being linked to concrete solutions – this can be partly explained by the lack of gender dimensions in the criteria for evaluating the plan and the lack of a specific budget for this purpose;

·       there is a striking lack of measures related to violence (e.g., GBV) and inequalities in the sharing of power (e.g., decision-making and politics) and women are mainly dealt with just as workforce participants;

·       the plans have embedded stereotypes that see women's problems in accessing the labour market, lower wages, or difficulties in career progression as simply due to a lack of skills and education or their need to learn (male) management skills;

·       there is still an excessive focus on male-dominated economic sectors and the difficulty of mainstreaming gender in those sectors;

·       an intersectional approach is completely absent in most plans, and although there are measures relating to age, social class, and disability, these grounds are usually presented as silos, without considering interactions between them;

·       with rare exceptions, a discussion of inequalities related to religion/belief, gender identity, and sexual orientation is noticeably absent;

·       there was a low level of involvement of representatives of feminist, immigrant, and LGBTQI+ organisations in the process of designing the plans;

·       the process of stakeholder involvement and public consultations, when not absent, were rather tokenist in nature or lacked transparency.