Gender and global social policy

In contrast to the study of national welfare regimes, global social policy (GSP) studies have largely invisibilised gender. The same cannot be said for GSP as practice. ‘Gender equality and women’s empowerment’ has become an established (if still contested) global norm, with an institutional architecture dedicated to making gender inequalities visible and promoting policies to address these. Various United Nations (UN) agencies and other intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), together with transnational feminist networks (TFNs), have worked to gender understandings of global poverty and inequality, labour policy, health, social protection and migration.

This chapter outlines ways of thinking about how GSP, as a field of academic study and as political practice, incorporates a gender lens. It begins with an overview of the global institutional architecture developed to make visible the gender dimensions of GSP issues. UN agencies and UN treaty bodies like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) play a critical role, but they do not work in isolation. Of critical importance are their links with feminist epistemic communities and TFNs. The second section looks at gender and labour policy, highlighting the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) standard-setting work. It shows that the ILO’s understanding has evolved, influenced by developments in the wider environment and the actions of TFNs.

Identification of women’s reproductive roles in the biological sense of women as bearers of children and in social reproduction understood as ‘the processes involved in maintaining and reproducing people … on a daily and generational basis’ (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006, p 3) contributes to the gendering of social policy practice.