Women and the Internet: A technology of liberation?

In November of last year the New Statesman ran an article called “You should have your tongue ripped out”: the reality of sexist abuse online. In it, women journalists and bloggers from different backgrounds and political persuasions described some of the abuse they receive online.

Cath Elliot wrote “If I’d been trying to keep a tally I would have lost count by now of the number of abusive comments I’ve received since I first started writing online back in 2007. And by abusive I don’t mean comments that disagree with whatever I’ve written — I came up through the trade union movement don’t forget, and I’ve worked in a men’s prison, so I’m not some delicate flower who can’t handle a bit of banter or heated debate — no, I’m talking about personal, usually sexualised abuse, the sort that on more than one occasion now has made me stop and wonder if what I’m doing is actually worth it. ..I read about how I’m apparently too ugly for any man to want to rape, or I read graphic descriptions detailing precisely how certain implements should be shoved into one or more of my various orifices.”

Blogger Dawn Foster wrote “The worst instance of online abuse I’ve encountered happened when I blogged about the Julian Assange extradition case. As more people shared it on Twitter with positive comments, a growing trickle of abusive comments appeared. Rather than simply being negative, it was clear the commenters hadn’t read the post: just clocked the title, my gender and started punching the keyboard furiously. The emails rarely mentioned the topic at hand: instead they focussed on my age, used phrases like “little girl”, described rape fantasies involving me and called me “ugly” and “disgusting”. Initially it was shocking: in the space of a week, I received a rabid email that included my home address, phone number and workplace address, included as a kind of threat. Then, after tweeting that I’d been waiting for a night bus for ages, someone replied that they hoped I’d get raped at the bus stop.”

Trans writer Jane Fae wrote “One made me giggle because I think it was written without knowledge of my situation or any ironic content whatsoever: a guy suggested that the problem with women like me is that we “didn’t see things rationally and what [we] needed was to be able to see things through male eyes for a few days”. Indeed.”

The next day Laurie Penny wrote on the subject in The Independent, saying “You come to expect it, as a woman writer, particularly if you’re political. You come to expect the vitriol, the insults, the death threats. After a while, the emails and tweets and comments containing graphic fantasies of how and where and with what kitchen implements certain pseudonymous people would like to rape you cease to be shocking, and become merely a daily or weekly annoyance, something to phone your girlfriends about, seeking safety in hollow laughter. …Most mornings, when I go to check my email, Twitter and Facebook accounts, I have to sift through threats of violence, public speculations about my sexual preference and the odour and capacity of my genitals, and attempts to write off challenging ideas with the declaration that, since I and my friends are so very unattractive, anything we have to say must be irrelevant. …Efforts were made to track down and harass my family, including my two school-age sisters. After one particular round of rape threats, including the suggestion that, for criticising neoliberal economic policymaking, I should be made to fellate a row of bankers at knifepoint, I was informed that people were searching for my home address. I could go on.”

Feminist blogger Sady Doyle then started a thread on Twitter under the hashtag ‘mencallmethings’ in which women writers’ experiences of death threats, rape fantasies and most typically, nasty comments about their appearance poured in from around the world.

One of the most common and most worrying things that the women said was that the comments had often made them consider if engaging in public life was worth all of this. In all of those cases, however, the women have continued to write. Others have not been so lucky.

Tech writer, programming educator and blogger Kathy Sierra had been the keynote speaker at South by Southwest Interactive and a kind of mainstream tech guru when in 2007 the personal backlash against her, among anonymous commenters was so extreme that she had to close down her blog, withdraw from speaking engagements and public life and even get police protection. Personal details about her family and home address were posted among highly sexualised, humiliating and murderous comments on various blogs and forums. Some of the posts included photoshopped images of her with a noose beside her head, a shooting target pointed at her face and of her being suffocated with a thong. When she explained in her blog why she had to step back from the public life, writing, “I have cancelled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same” it sparked a whole new wave of hate online, with commenters saying she had taken things too personally and was making a fool of herself by overreacting.

As studies have begun to emerge about gender and online media, they haven’t been very encouraging. A study by the University of Maryland’s school of engineering showed that chatroom participants using female names were 25 times more likely to receive threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or gender-neutral names.

To give a more local example, a survey conducted on Politics.ie came up with the rather depressing figure that only 14% of its users were female, meaning that participation is actually slightly lower than in the Dáil.

Here are some of the quotes that followed when the survey was posted on the site:

Toughbutfair says “It just goes show what a load of bull all that PC talk of needing more women in the dail. Women, in general, aren’t into politics or business or I.T.”

Another read:

“In real life, I find women general don’t engage as readily as men in political debate but there could be a number of reasons for that. Personally, I’m famously argumentative, many people don’t like debating with me because I can be over powering, but is that an excuse for women to just refuse engagement with men at all?”
And another:

“Well it’s not a site for singles to meet …
I demand that you introduce a quota system, until women are equally represented etc.”

What makes this interesting to me is not so much the issue of online misogyny itself but how it relates to the broader political and ideological backdrop of the moment.

When Nicholas Negroponte invisaged a digital future in which the political effects of the internet would be so profound that “there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox” it was 1995 and the West was then in the grip of the techno-utopian fervour of the so-called New Economy. Driven by the growth of the Internet sector, the digital entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were its heroes. So triumphalist were the boosters of the internet-led post-industrial economic miracle that commentators like MIT economist Rudi Dornbusch hedged their bets, saying “The U.S. economy will not see a recession for years to come. We don’t want one, we don’t need one, and, as we have the tools to keep the current expansion going, we won’t have one. This expansion will run forever.” Not long afterwards, the dotcom bubble burst and some of the strident rhetoric about digital future went with it. Critiques of the twin narratives of a speculative, friction-free, post-material economy and cyber-utopia began to emerge. But that was then and today the story is rather different.

By 2011 cyber-utopianism and the liberating promise of the internet had reemerged, this time bringing on board a motely crue of cheerleaders, from Hilary Clinton, with her famous internet freedom speech, to former Worker’s Power supporter Paul Mason and from Ayn Rand-reading Silicon Valley free marketeers to left libertarians.

The hacker ethic, held now in high esteem by protest movements in the West, tells us that the network always always trumps the hierarchy. We are told that the internet by its very structure is radicalising us. In his study of Spanish internet users “Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society” Manuel Castells wrote: “The more an individual has a project of autonomy (personal, professional, socio-political, communicative), the more she uses the Internet. And in a time sequence, the more he/she uses the Internet, the more autonomous she becomes vis-a-vis societal rules and institutions.”

The breaking down of the authority of print and broadcast media and its replacement with the anarchy of the internet has been much celebrated by the online counterculture. And yet, if you want to find the most vicious misogyny available in the written word today, you will not find it in what are being characterised now as outmoded hierarchical structures and institutions. You will not find it in the Dáil or the Irish Independent. If you look for it online, you will not find it when you look to the big bad corporations or when you follow the ad revenue, as Facebook and Google have actually served to temper it with their tendency towards de-anonymising. You will find it in precisely the kind of spaces that we are being told are the most free: they are the most unedited, the most anonymous, the most ad-free places online. Find me any football terrace, any house of parliament, any broadcast or print media in which men speak to or about women the way they do on 4chan, home of Anonymous and other hacker groups of which some sections of the left now approve and even admire.

I understand that no political movement wants to be on the wrong side of history, and to say anything critical about the brave new digital future in this particular moment, when the liberating potential of the internet looks clear, seems curmodgeonly. To use Paul Mason’s analogy: parents once worried about allowing calculators in school because they would destroy young people’s ability to add, and trying to suggest that we should in some way turn back the clock on internet technology is equally futile. It’s simply too useful a technology.

But given the overwhelming evidence that old gender roles are not only transposing themselves online but actually fanatical anti-feminist and misogynist discourse is finding a more conducive medium in the internet than anything which came before it, shouldn’t we be making the link between these individual women’s experiences and the challenges it poses to the broader cyber-utopian narrative of the moment? Isn’t it strange that some feminists are still calling for the sacking and the censure of sexist commentators in broadcast and print media while such commentators and their authority has been so deeply undermined by new media and is in rapid decline anyway? After the last dinosaur of the “old media” – the unionised, paid, secure journalist – has been replaced by the unanswerable foam flecked ragemongers of the blogosphere and anonymous comment threads, we might have lost people like Kevin Myers but will we as a society also have lost the mechanisms with which to make our media commentators answerable? TV presenters can be fired, advertisments can be withdrawn, public comments can be retracted, that is, when we know who made them. This is not a call for internet censorship but rather a call for a discussion among feminists about the very new and very different media parameters we now have to deal with. If women have found entering the public fray and the culture of electoral politics alienating and unwelcoming, and are consequently moving into those areas a bit more slowly and tentatively than the feminists of the second wave might have hoped, then one has to wonder if we will be able to withstand the hatred that is in store for us online. I’m sorry to say I’m not optimistic.

Perhaps feminism is so busy still subjecting print media, broadcast and film to its critique while being washed along with the cyber-utopian consensus of the moment – one which tells us that the internet will be more democratic and will make us more free – that we have failed to notice what has been emerging in place of that flawed old system. Kevin Myers, after all, has to put his name to everything he writes. He has to stand over his claims, legally and in terms of his personal reputation and he can be debated with on the same terms. If what these women are experiencing is a true glimpse into the kind of freedom new media will bring, then I’m afraid the day might soon come when we remember Myers quite fondly.

Feminist Open Forum and Kilbarrack CDP

A NATION IN CRISIS:   Feminist Perspectives

Saturday 13 March 2010, Kilbarrack CDP

CONFERENCE PAPERS

Anne Good:  Nation in Crisis: Developing Feminist Perspectives
Cathleen O’Neill:  The Culling of Community Development and its Impact on Women’s Projects
Rita Fagan:  Enabling Resistance
Sara Burke:  A Crisis in Healt:
Brid Connolly:  Liberating Learning: Feminist Re-Readings of Liberal Education
Mary Murphy: The ‘Ship of Men’: Gender Equality as a Solution to this Man-made Crisis

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Nation in Crisis: developing feminist perspectives

Dr Anne Good

Second wave feminism reached Ireland in the late 1960s and had a transformative impact on Irish society in the decades since then. Irish women moved into paid employment, education, politics and leadership in unprecedented numbers. Long and bitter battles in relation to contraception, divorce and respect for single parent families were, eventually and on the whole, won. Further battles were partially but not wholly won, for example: in relation to gender equality at work, the need for completion of Irish democracy through full inclusion of women in political life, on reproductive rights, violence against women, respect for gay and lesbian people, for travellers, for disabled people and other marginalised groups, and equality across all aspects of Irish life. New issues in the areas of migration, trafficking of women, the abuse of children, emerged and are still being contested. Silences were broken across many formerly taboo aspects of society.

However, the current crisis has shown the limits and the fragility of the progress made through second wave feminism. As Ireland has faced the worst social, political, economic and ethical crisis since independence, it has been shocking how the voices of feminist women have been excluded or marginalised from the public debates and discourse, and how ignored feminist analyses and their potential contribution have remained.

The crisis and the anti equality, right wing response by the State have revealed in stark ways the limits of what feminism has achieved and the work which remains to be done. It has become clear that, despite apparent progress, the Irish State is still firmly in the grasp of patriarchal, middle class and wealthy men (and the few women of like mind who occupy positions of power). Over these last two years this ruthless elite has been imposing a strategy of what has been well described as socialism for the rich and neo liberalism for the poor. The crisis seems to have been seen by some as an opportunity to undo much of the progress which women had made and is revealing the dangerous limitations of the dominant analyses and policy responses which ignore or actively reject feminist perspectives.

The challenge for feminist thinkers, activists and politicians is to break this new silencing and to ensure that feminist perspectives once more impact forcefully on the emerging public debate about the future of this country and its people. We have much to contribute and yet our voices are seldom heard. This must change. To this end a major feminist conference on the national crisis was organised last March by the Feminist Open Forum and hosted by Kilbarrack Community Development Project. The conference aimed to build on discussions held by the FOF during and after its 2009 Recession Session, which critiqued the absence, indeed exclusion, of strong feminist voices in the public debates on the unprecedented crisis engulfing Irish society. In a presentation at the Recession Session I proposed a framework for developing feminist analyses and this was circulated to all the speakers for the Nation in Crisis conference.

This framework, which was further refined in the light of developments in the intervening year since it was first proposed, argued that feminist analyses would have six characteristics as follows:

1. Holistic Analysis

Feminist analyses holistically understand the current crisis as having social, political and constitutional as well as economic dimensions. We are experiencing not just a severe recession but a crisis of all aspects of society. Many, such as Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, are identifying a disastrous political and constitutional failure along with rising inequality, damage to social cohesion and to individual lives. Other have emphasised the social construction of crime, with some types of white collar crime being virtually unpunished in Ireland while ‘gangland’ crime gives rise to moral panics and outrage.

2. Gendered analysis

Feminists need to ensure that the gendered analyses are undertaken, which have so far been absent or muted.  All reflections on causality and attempts to map a positive way forward need a gender perspective, which to date has not been central. Some examples include:

– Job losses in sectors with large female employment (retail and tourism) are less commented on than those in the building sector

– The impact of the crisis on part time, temporary and other ‘non traditional’ work, also hits women disproportionally

– Reductions in public sector areas of health and education and social care, impact differently on women

– Social disintegration is accompanied by growing rates of gender based violence and exploitation of the poorest women

–With regard to pensions and other social payments, the different situations of men and women need to be understood.

The papers from the conference took up this challenge and clearly showed the value of feminist analysis in relation to economics, health, education, the community sector, poverty and inequality, power, the media and politics

3. Challenging the orthodoxies

Forty years ago a new feminist movement bravely challenged a stultifying orthodoxy which enforced silence about much suffering and exclusion. We must do so again in the face of newer but equally stultifying and silencing orthodoxies such as neo liberalism, consumerism and pornographic discourses.

In particular we need to strongly refute the ‘we are where we are’ and ‘there is no choice’ mantras imposed on us by government and much of the media. We need to recall what Keynes said during the recession of the 1930s: that those who claim to simply be stating the obvious are often slaves to the ideas of a long dead economist. We must assert that a regime which cares more about international bond holders and bankers than its own citizens is one which must be ended. As feminists we also need to reintroduce some less dominant concepts: such as global justice, the idea of ‘enough’, social responsibility, human rights, ethics.

4. Private lives as well as public events

In trying to analyse what has happened to our country and to develop a route to a better future, feminists insist on examining both private and public perspectives, and their inter relationships. We have always valued lived experience as a basis for knowledge, and used emancipatory research in preference to ‘victim stories’.

So, for example, we need to hear:

• what is happening in families of various kinds, what is happening to migrants, to children, to older people, to disabled people…?
• what is happening on hospital wards as well as in health budgets?
• what is happening with care services such as home helps as well as in social welfare policy making?
• in what ways is gender based violence rising with stresses from the crisis?

5. Global feminist ethics

One of our tasks as feminist is to return to developing global feminist ethics to inform our vision of future society. Our former President, and probably Ireland’s most famous feminist, Mary Robinson, is already providing leadership and plans focussed around the idea of climate justice. She is linking this concept with that of gender inequality in a way which can inspire us all.

For feminists, ethics is not just about health or reproduction or sex, it is about all aspects of life, and new ethical thinking is sorely needed in relation to inequality, social services, taxation, crime, business and banking, to name  a few social dimensions which are the underpinning of the current crisis.

6. Historical and futuristic analysis

A feminist perspective also means taking both historical and futuristic dimensions into account. We need to analyse the history of our movement at least since the beginning of second wave feminism in the late 1960s, our agendas, our successes, the issues we still struggle for, the backlashes we have endured, the ways of organising which worked and those which did not. We also need to envision and argue for a better society from the crash of the dominant model and refuse to limit our thinking to the goal of getting back to where we were/recovery.

Emerging Positive Changes

Since these discussions began within the Feminist Open Forum much has happened to make us despair but there are also some hopeful signs, such as:

• New political engagement
• People revisiting old values
• Relief from rampant and frenetic consumerism
• Getting clearer ‘who the enemy is’
• More clarity about the role of EU (imposing adjustments based on making the poor pay for the crimes of the rich) and the need for expanded EU wide radical feminist politics
• Examples of resistance eg in Iceland and Greece

Each of the powerful papers presented at the conference applied this framework to a different area of Irish life. Together they assemble an irrefutable argument that feminist thinking is of vital importance to fully understanding and then finding a way forward out of this crisis.

The eight conference speakers addressed the challenge of developing feminist analyses of a wide range of aspects of the crisis. Ursula Barry provided a cogent feminist perspective on the economy. Rita Fagan and Cathleen O’Neill spoke with passion and anger about the devastation being inflicted on women in the community sector by the recession and the government cuts. Orla O’Connor comprehensively addressed the gendered issues emerging in the area of social welfare, poverty and caring work. Mary Murphy gave a broad-ranging analysis of the politics of the crisis and the limits of media coverage and public discourse, most especially the exclusion of feminist voices. Sarah Bourke spoke scathingly of what she termed a poverty, inequality and health nexus amounting to a form of Irish apartheid.  Brid Connolly analysed changes in the education sector and its regression from its previous role of empowering women and improving their lives. Nusha Yonkova described the impact of the crisis on the lives of some of the most marginalized women in Irish society: migrant women.

The papers which are now gathered into this collection, were discussed in two workshop sessions and provided the basis for developing ideas to be included in a plan of action. These ideas were discussed in the final plenary of the conference and it was agreed that they would be developed into a plan of action. This is now the task which faces us all.

Dr Anne Good is a feminist sociologist.

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Feminist Open Forum
The ‘Ship of Men’: Gender equality as a solution to this man-made crisis
Mary Murphy

Introduction

The feminist framework developed by Anne Good[1] focuses on five key principles; holistic, gendered, challenging, the importance of the private and the public and the importance of feminist ethics informing policy and practice. Baker et al (2004)[2] make the case for a holistic understanding of equality which embraces not only income or resource inequality but also political, status and affective equalities. Nancy Fraser (1995)[3] draws attention to the relationship between redistribution, recognition and representation. This short input continues this tradition by making the links between women’s political inequality and this economic crisis. It draws attention to power and discourse, to media and public debate. It argues that absence of women in decision-making arenas contributed to a style of politics and economic governance that emphasised short-term greed over long-term care and well-being. It argues that responses to the present crisis should include governance measures to enhance and increase women’s involvement in all State and economic decision-making; this is a prerequisite to changing the substance of policy making and the outcomes that policy generates.

As other conference papers argue convincingly, women will inevitably suffer the burden of managing poverty and other forms of suffering caused by the crisis. This paper points to the fact that this crisis, is not just an inevitable crisis of capitalism, it is a crisis of a particular Irish style of patriarchy and an extreme version of neoliberal capitalism – in other words it is a man-made crisis. Pauline Conroy’s work (2009)[4] shows how a gender analysis of the crisis changes our understanding of it. This is important. Our understanding and analysis will frame our policy responses to recovery and restructuring. If women are not in the picture at the moment of the analysis they will not be there when solutions are designed and implemented. Conroy reviews the US sub prime mortgage market and shows how the twin banks Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac created ‘gendered’ sub prime products aimed at poor black women in the US. This lightly regulated sub market contributed significantly to the US banking crisis and the fall of Lehman brothers – commonly agreed to trigger the global fiscal crisis. Conroy goes further in gendering the story of crisis by analysing the gender profile of staff in those banks and showing an overwhelming gender divide between senior management (male) and service staff (female). She shows that the personal debt and credit experience poor black women and the hierarchical gendered structure of employment in the banking and financial industries are central to the story of US and global fiscal collapse. Her work draws attention to the need to gender the story of the Irish banking and fiscal crises.

Gendering the story of the Irish crisis

We need to gender the story of the Irish banks. There was no woman chief executive officer of the six Irish banks under the Irish government guarantee and of the six chairpersons there was only one woman (Gillian Bowler in Irish Nationwide Bank). A gender desegregation of banking and issues of access to credit might well throw light on the product segmentation of the Irish banking sector. Conroy points to the lack of access to credit for poor women and the growth of the Irish sub prime market in mortgages. There was only one woman out of the 12 board members of the Central Bank charged with regulating and safeguarding our banking system.

A famous landmark in the Irish story of the Irish banking crisis is that famous September 2008 midnight meeting in government buildings between our political and banking worlds. The banking and political actors in that room were exclusively male. No woman was among the senior Department of Finance officials or legal community advising the Irish government. Eugene McCague (chairman of Arthur Cox), provided the legal advice to Brian Cowen, Pádraig O’Riordan (managing partner of Arthur Cox) advised Brian Lenihan. The same firm advised Anglo Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland. Arthur Cox firm was also appointed legal adviser to Nama, the National Asset Management Agency. While 23 out of their 89 Dublin-based team are women so some women may be on these legal teams. There is one woman out of 12 in the senior management of the Department of Finance. Even those appointed by government to run the two-stage banking inquiry Professor Patrick Honohan, the Governor of the Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland and international banking experts Klaus Regling and Max Watson, are exclusively male.

It is instructive too to observe the narrative of the crisis through the 13 books written and published about it in 2009[5]. The authors were from all walks: academics, journalists, politicians and international bankers but it is interesting that only two publications were co-authored by women (Kathy Sheridan and Martina Devlin). Why is it largely men telling our story? Penguin Books hosted a series of debates by four of the authors. It began with a 1,200 packed audience in the National Concert Hall titled ‘4 Angry Men’. Where, we might ask, were the angry women? There is an internal challenge to the feminist community, why are we not telling and writing our story?

The substantive content of these publications by and large documents the villains of the crisis: the bankers, the developers, the builders and the politicians. What is striking is the total invisibility of women in the story of the economic crisis who, with one or two exceptions, are mainly evident as wives, girlfriends and daughters of the men. No author problematises this lack of women in the picture and the failure to observe or analyse the patriachal hue of the picture they paint. Indeed instead of Ship of Fools Fintan O’Toole may well have titled his 2009 book Ship of Men.

If we look at the political and policy responses to the crisis we can also see a dearth of women in decision-making. The recent political economy of social policy is captured in the policy processes that produced the NAMA, the McCarthy Review on Public Expenditure and Public Sector Staffing Levels (McCarthy, 2009) and Budget 2010 and the Commission on Taxation (Ireland, 2009). The NWCI has already commented on the problematic and unsatisfactory gender composition of these key policy processes. Despite the crisis of social partnership the National Economic and Social Development Office (NESDO) remains as a site of response to the crisis. In previous work I pointed to the gender blind nature of the analysis in the Developmental Welfare State[6] and the less than satisfactory gender composition of the board of the National Economic and Social Council (NESC). Gender equality has always struggled for a fair hearing within social partnership and recent NESC publications and proposals for work on the crisis[7] continue to be relatively gender blind. Gender-specific, media and policy commentators continue to debate the nature of the crisis from the perspective of young males.

If we take public comment about economic policy as an illustration of the nature of public debate on the crisis we see again that it is highly gendered. Take the NAMA debate and use as an example the letter in the Irish Times (August 29^th 2009), we see only 14 per cent or seven of the 46 signatories are women. Similarly, a TASC[8] co-ordinated signed letter to the Irish Times (March 9t^h 2009) had only two women among the 28 signatories. Not surprising then that these letters or economic commentaries had no gender analysis.

An interesting trend in the Irish fiscal crisis has been the rise in the use of ‘blogging’ as a forum for political debate. A review of input from February 13^th to March 13^th 2010 into two Irish blogs shows disturbing trends; irisheconomy.ie has had no recent inputs form women. Indeed women only comprise 10 per cent or three out of thirty-two contributors. There are glass ceilings or hidden barriers for women attempting to enter this blog; it only accepts entries form established professional economists or those in economic departments of third level institutions. A review of inputs to the more inclusive blog progressiveeconomy.ie again shows no female contributions during the same timespan. This blog is moderated by a woman and she has actively sought women contributors. But only five non-staff women have ever contributed.  It appears not to matter whether the economic debate is neoliberal, mainstream or progressive, Irish women are not blogging about economics.

Bua (2009)[9] argues this is not unusual; rather the world of blogging appears to be another ‘patriarchal failure of discourse’ and to mirror the democratic deficits in the real world. Women are more likely to ‘lurk’, to watch and observe; those most likely to ‘flood’ or to make a disproportionate number of entries are men. The virtual world mirrors the gendered patterns of political participation and discourse in the real world. Bua notes the dominant online style of discourse is ‘assertive, authoritative, adverbial, sarcastic, and self promoting, the more subservient female style is shorter, more personally oriented tentative, apologetic and supportive’. No wonder, then, that women self exit mixed blogs and set up women-only blog spaces.

So far this paper suggests this is not just an economic or fiscal crisis – it is much much more. It is a crisis caused in equal part by our model of development, our neoliberal variety of crony capitalism and caused by our strange Catholic culture of patriarchy. It is a failure of our highly gendered constitutional and political features. When we look for solutions it is worth keeping this in mind. It is very interesting that when seeking solutions for its banking crisis, Iceland specifically addressed the need for gender balance. It is even more instructive to look at those countries that have weathered the crisis. It is little coincidence that countries with better evolved and more sustainable models of development, banking and politics lead the world for gender equality in decision making. Greater inequality leads to more gendered input into substantive policy making and more equal outcomes. This is better for everyone. Finland, a small ex colony on the edge of Europe offers a useful comparator for us to benchmark Irish women’s participation in political and economic decision making. EU averages are also given

Fig 1

Irish women’s political/economic participation benchmarked against Finland and EU

	Ireland	Finland	EU average
% of members of national parliaments	13	48	24
% Women ministers	20	60	26
% Women as board members in publicly quoted companies	8	24	12
% Women as president of publicly quoted companies	5	8	3
% Women on boards of central banks	8	31	18
% women public administration level one	19	36	25

What is striking about the many books on the crisis is not their prescription for economic recovery. It is that commentators who diverge ideologically all agree that changes in political and corporate governance institutions are at the heart of implementing any solution to the crisis. Gendering this debate is vital but has not yet been achieved. Research shows that where women are present they make a difference to the substantive policy agenda, the nature of the policy process and dialogue and the actual outcomes. In arguing for women in politics we need not defend the indefensible. We remember Margaret Thatcher. We know the contribution of our own ‘three wise women’ Ministers: Mary Harney, Mary Hanafin and Mary Coughlan. Between them the three Marys govern the governance and policy debacle we call FAS, the recent policy initiative to privatise pensions, nursing homes and health care, and the recent initiative to make work mandatory for lone parents who are mothers of teenagers.

It is not a woman who will make a difference but a gendered redistribution of power to women will. A critical mass of women in all places of governance will make the difference. To the non gendered demands for new republic and constitutional and political reform must be added gender candidate quotas in national and local elections and a 40 per cent statutory mandatory gender balance on all state boards and private boards. There is also a need to develop and use policy tools that enable us to gender desegregate the impacts of policy choices. Subjecting An Bord Snip recommendations to a policy proofing process that includes a gender impact assessment might well reframe decision making. Requiring all national budgets to have a gender budget statement might draw public attention to the gendered distribution of policy and resources allocation.

Gendering economic debate offers ways to reframe the crisis as an opportunity for gender equality. It also helps us respond more effectively to threats to gender equality[10]. These come in two dimensions. The late Ted Kennedy observed in the US Senate (2008:2 cited in Smith 2009) that women’s vulnerability in economic downturns has received too little focus. Women ultimately bear the burden of cuts and poverty; they manage debt and bear the stress of household and child poverty. There is also the need to be aware of the variety of women’s needs, experiences and situations that policy must address – some women are more threatened by recession. Women’s different relationship to the labour market mean falling employment rates for women are not necessarily accompanied by similar rises in unemployment rates; there may be pressure or barriers for women attempting to sign on the live register or claimant count. Workers in or having had atypical jobs are also more likely to be excluded from unemployment benefit systems since they may have broken employment histories or may not have made sufficient contributions – this has longer term pension implications but short-term benefit implications. An analysis that focuses on the live register as the political manifestation of unemployment will inevitably focus more on male and young male unemployment. This has worrying implications for equality agenda.

The second threat is more ideological in nature. Smith (2009) observes that in previous recessions (US in the 1930s, Finland in the 1990s), policy responses did row back progress in women’s participation in labour market employment. It is obvious that the agenda of cutting community development infrastructure, decreasing welfare rates and the minimum wage was a pre-recession political agenda. Recession is an ideal smokescreen for ideologues to pursue policies that hijack and downgrade equality issues in the national policy agenda to ‘a luxury we cannot afford’.

However there is also reason to hope. Smith (2009) observes that recession offers opportunities to achieve European goals of high employment and equality. There are opportunities to argue creatively that increasing women’s employment and economic participation is a perquisite of economic recovery. The labour market is still highly gendered. Debate about its responses to the crisis needs to reflect the gendered reality of the recession’s impact. The difference in the types of jobs that women and men do shapes the impact of the recession and should shape our policy responses; different policy responses will benefit or disadvantage different groups.

Smith (2009) shows it is possible to have a highly sophisticated analysis of gender equality and recession. It should be possible to advance gender equality as a recovery strategy, as a parallel strategy to other investment strategies in a smart economy or green technologies that seeks to modernise the physical infrastructure. Conversely arguing for stimulus spending for investment in public services like health, transport education and housing or more general investment in services and infrastructure is also an investment for gender equality.

A gender input into and analysis of a recovery plan are essential for recovery. This will not happen without bringing women’s voice into all economic and political decision-making arenas.

Mary Murphy, Lecturer in Irish Politics and Society, Department of Sociology, NUI, Maynooth

Notes

The Culling of Community Development and its Impact on Women’s Projects

Cathleen O’Neill

Like most women in my social class at the time, I was an early school leaver. I started work at 13 years of age using a doctored birth cert.  I returned to school 22 years later, nervously trying out a Basic English class, taking a small step toward finding the woman who got lost between the vows and rows of marriage and mothering and of learning and caring alone for five children.

I saw adult education and community development as the means of developing myself and my community.  Words such as Freire, process, and political analysis were transforming words coupled with feminism, equality, social class and gender analysis. Bliss!!! Being given the chance to “name my own world” vis a vis Paolo Freire and Audre Lorde, and demonstrating my lived experience through the value of experiential learning and community development. These early forays led to my need to understand the theory and constructs of equality and feminism. Along with other like-minded women we began to apply the theory in practice and we grew and developed in tandem with our groups and our community.

Two decades of vibrant community development saw many positive changes for community groups and women’s groups – we became a force to be reckoned with as we lobbied for and with other women. In all these endeavours we carried the values of gender equality and social justice forward. And I think that is why we are being killed off!

The economy is being blamed for the changes currently being made in the community and voluntary sector, but we activists know that more than eight years ago there were plans to close down the sector. I was there for those battles. The sector was getting too strong, too bolshie, too successful at educating the grassroots and empowering people to claim their rights. All the economic collapse provided was a sure-fire excuse for getting rid of us – all in the name of reducing structures.

Be very clear about this, there is no room in Ireland for the dissenting or critical voice. There is no room in Ireland for the community project that tries to bring about change or inform people about the implications of cuts in social welfare or lobby for equality. Community workers have spent the last year:

• feeling silenced,
• working in a strait jacket,
• trying every means to fight the threats to the sector,
• toeing the line,
• being professional
• feeling nervous when speaking about the issue through the media

Community development as we know it ceased to exist on December 14^th, 2009 when the government closed 29 CDPs, deeming them non viable after an unequal, hidden and unclear review process. Two-thirds of these groups are Dublin based. The remaining 150 projects are being merged with local partnership companies, along with their transfers of undertaking.

Partnerships are about providing labour intervention and training.  They are not community development led and there are fears that they will follow a labour market agenda. Those community development groups that enabled community education to grow organically will now be told to offer a different kind of development and education and accreditation.  No more possibility of meaningful engagement for social change, it’s our way or the highway! We, as workers and activists, will be neutered and domesticated by local partnerships.  The loss of community development projects, and process, ethos and principles, will have long-term consequences for marginalised community and groups in Ireland.

Since that time, as members of the National Community Development Forum, we have lobbied tirelessly to demonstrate the impact that these cuts will have on women.  We have articulated the inherent dangers of taking away the independence of CDPs. The risks of damaging the voice of those most removed from the decision-making process. To no avail. The state has been consistent in conducting a war on the most poor and the most vulnerable in our society. Any attempt to close or merge CDPs will result in serious damage being done to marginalised communities. Research from the Tavistock Institute in Britain illustrates what happened there when key community anchor organisations were taken away.

The experience of our own community workers will echo that British research. We too, are blue in the face articulating the dangers that communities face if they lose their CDPs. Telling and retelling what will happen to elderly members of our community, to women, and women’s groups, men’s groups, children with special needs, communities with special needs – because they were counted in the first place. What the government doesn’t seem to get is the powerful role that a small two- or three-worker project can play in community cohesion, in leveraging funding far in excess of the small grant it receives, in enabling community groups to become viable, in empowering communities to articulate their own needs, from the bottom up.

CDPs are key community anchor organisations and the only organisations that could challenge for and with people who were left behind, discarded and dismissed. All of this happening during an era when a little over 20 men, politicians, property developers and bankers, were playing a giant Monopoly game with our country and our people. A wink and a nod here, a tilt of the eyebrow there, a quiet phone call late in the evening, a sharing of information from all the key boards they sat on – as they bartered our futures and our children’s futures to buy and sell the most expensive land in the world.

Or maybe they do get it. They certainly seemed to get the role played by the Equality Authority and Combat Poverty in reaching for equality and social justice. Perhaps they do realise the role played by CDPs in helping people to name their own worlds and identify their own needs. Why else would they come after voluntary boards of management? Maybe they do know! Hence the savage attack on the sector and on CDPs, on working class communities.  Why else would they come after us in such a dishonest, demeaning way? We lost key leaders at the beginning of this year, leaders who were sacked by email, their projects closed by email, after a spurious review and an even more spurious appeals process.

The absolute idiocy behind this kind of thinking has been well highlighted already. Where can the justification be, for example, in purporting to ‘save’ an average of less than €95,000 yearly per project in these areas by removing supports that the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people depend upon? The fact that this will generate the need for significant increased service spending – addressing the effects of individual and community breakdown – demonstrates in reality a reckless disregard for accountability in public expenditure. Community health initiatives and suicide prevention are just two of the many initiatives that will stop.

The cost of ending this work will be considerably higher than the cost of keeping it going. If none of these considerations was taken into account by the enlightened elite in our government, then there is a clear case to be answered: at the very least in relation to incompetence leading to yet more waste of public resources in the longer term. What if this is not incompetence?  After all, is it not difficult to credit that even our own particularly challenged and overpaid political leaders cannot grasp the damage and cost associated with their decision?

We think they do know. And that is why they decided more than seven years ago to close us down. The decision has nothing to do with McCarthy or the economy. We could not be managed; the culture of the wink-wink nod-nod was not ours. We weren’t a commodity.  We are not just a cheap service provider. We have worked consistently to ensure longer term community sustainability – giving people a voice, a sense of self-value, hope and real opportunities for social participation and personal progression. We know this and they know this, but we have to go. The reality is that sustainable communities, based on equality of opportunity, are not on the Irish political agenda. It is not so long, after all, since a certain Minister for ‘Equality’, ‘Justice’ and Law Reform reminded us all that equality is bad for the economy.

We have to be doing something right! Otherwise they would not have spent so much energy and time trying to kill us off.  For this reason we will continue to commit to the task of building equality, self-determination and hope in our own communities with people who have obviously been deemed surplus to requirements. We call on all remaining Community Development Projects moving forward to maintain a focus on equitable social sustainability and to resist the very clear pressure to become low-cost providers of services to the poor.

Don’t confuse this madness with incompetence. Do understand how these kinds of cuts are consistent with the kind of vision they have for future Irish society. Organise and work in your own communities to build a better future for all people who live in Ireland. Dig where you stand. Continue to apply resistance, insistence and persistence in all endeavours and most importantly. Tell them that you know! Tell them you are aware that they are attacking the most vulnerable and it has to stop! Tell them that our communities, and community development, and equality and social justice are rights and rights that cannot be bartered or sold to the highest bidder.

Cathleen O’Neill is an educator and community activist. She is Co-ordinator of Kilbarrack CDP.

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Enabling Resistance

Rita Fagan

I would like to thank Feminist Open Forum for the opportunity as a woman community activist to be on this platform today. I would also like to thank the management of Kilbarrack Community Development Project for hosting this very important event and gathering during International Women’s week of 2010.

Kilbarrack Community Development Project and my own in St. Michael’s Estate Women’s Family Resource Centre Community Development Project are two projects which survived the most recent cull by Minister John Curran in to the National Community Development Programme. However, fourteen projects were forced to close and were lost to their communities, which is a shocking indictment of those in power.

A Nation in crisis, a Feminist perspective

For the working class, traveller, new communities, excluded older women and single parents who participate, connect or play a managing role, the crisis today is not a new phenomenon.  These women were poor yesterday are poor today and I have no doubt that they will be poor tomorrow. The Celtic Tiger did not visit their communities as it did Castleknock, Rathgar, Dublin 4 and Montenotte. It didn’t arrive bearing gifts, rather it came in the form of higher bills, ESB, Gas, higher rents, school trips and books etc. It also took them further away from the possibilities of employment.

The war against the poor began when the government:

• Withdrew funding from the Community Workers Co-Op.
• Gave a sharp dressing-down to Pavee Point who had stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with the Roma Gypsies on the M50 when they protested against their appalling living conditions. For this they became victims of a minister who demanded an investigation.
• Slashed the Equality Authority budget by 43%  and the Human Rights Commission by 23%.
• Totally dismantled the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Inter-culturalism.
• Took away the support agencies to the Community Development Projects.
• Dismantled and closed the Combat Poverty Agency
• Beheaded the Local Drugs Task Forces.
• Unfairly, unjustly and unnecessarily closed twenty Community Development Projects, thirteen of them in Dublin

By the end of this year, they’ll be coming for the Network Structure.

Community Development Programmes

The local Community Development Projects are of vital importance to women and the community. They are a place of support, of learning, of survival of male violence and abuse, of collective action, of safety, of artistic expression, of children’s development and of family support. Women come to develop their voices and analyses. They learn how to resist and mobilise. They learn how to be decision makers and active citizens. They learn how to fight for their rights and their communities and create better living environments for their family’s future.

So what is the role of the women’s movement?

So what is the role of the women’s movement and community sector in a nation in crisis? From my perspective it is as follows:

• The first thing to do is to defend Local Community Development Projects, the National Community Development Programme and the community sector. National recovery needs community development.
• The second is that all women show true solidarity to their sisters at the bottom of our society, just as those in Pavee Point stood with the Roma Gypsies.
• We need to reject the logic of the ‘right’ that we are all in this mess together; we are not in this all together, but we are certainly paying the price.
• We need to bear witness to what happens to women in their communities in the context of the economic crisis and cuts. We need to document the great stories of their daily struggles.
• We need to re-energise the women’s movement and unite women across class and culture.
• We need to defend our public services and also challenge the demonising those workers
• We need to create our own agendas and be able to offer alternatives.
• We need to mobilise, connect and develop an alliance across the left.
• Finally we need to prevent those experiencing systematic inequality from being silenced

Our unity in the Women’s Movement comes from the fact that the exploitation of women is national, international and universal.

Rita Fagan is a community activist. She is Director of St Michael’s Estate Resource Centre and Women’s Development Project.

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A Crisis in Health?

Sara Burke

This paper will look at the impact of the economic crisis on women’s health and the implications of the crisis on health service provision for Irish women.

What we know about women’s health and access to health services

We know that poor people get sick more often and die younger. We know that women live longer lives but bear a disproportionate burden of ill health throughout their lives experiencing more chronic illness. We know that women bear the burden of care work, whether with children or parents or in paid work. We know that people need health care cross the life cycle but the most intense need for health care is earliest and last days and years and in life, in child bearing and in old age.

Some women experience poorer health because of poverty, inequality, exclusion and discrimination or a combination of all of these. These include Traveller women, women in direct provision, women with disabilities, women users of mental health services, and older isolated women. Improving public health and access and quality of health services is central to improving the quality and length of women’s lives.

Impact of the Economic Crisis on Women’s Health
Income, education, our living conditions, the environment, training opportunities, the quality of housing, levels of poverty and inequality, discrimination and stigma all impact upon our health. Therefore addressing these issues will have positive health impacts for women. So what has been happening on these issues for women in Ireland in the recent past?
Despite a decade of increased employment and rising incomes, we know that women earn substantially less than men. We know that many areas where women work in care, in low paid public and private sector jobs, in Community Employment (CE) schemes, in community development projects – these jobs are been cut or the wages have been cut for workers still in those jobs.

Increased unemployment and lower wages has immediate and long term impacts on women’s social, psychological and physical health and well being. Unemployment has a particular impact on mental health – whether one’s own or one’s partner – having to live on less money, the possibility or reality of long term unemployment, worry over mortgage repayments or quite simply not having enough to live on can all have significant negative impacts on health.

The cuts in social welfare hit people very hard and often it is the women who alone or in the family are trying to make ends meet. Quite clearly recent government policy of increasing levies, cutting public sector wages, cutting social welfare, of failing to have a jobs policy to keep people in employment, of cutting CE schemes and community development projects has and will have serious impacts on women’s health.

Impact of the Budget Cuts on Health Service
And what’s been happening in the health services? In relation to the overall budget allocated to health, there was a quadrupling of the health budget between 1997 and 2007. However, there was a levelling out of the health budget between 2005 and 2009. Although there was not a drop in the allocation to health, in real terms it was a cut as Ireland is in the middle of a baby boom, has a growing, ageing population, increased medical inflation, alongside rising expectations. These have all increased demands on health services with an ever tightening budget. And the significant rise in the health budget since 1997 must be viewed in the context of decades of under resourcing of health services, in particular of the infrastructure for health, such as buildings and equipment.
So up to 2010, the health budget was more or less maintained. However between 2009 and 2010, there was a five per cent budget cut. Again his must be viewed in the context of increasing demand and costs.

There have been three major budgetary initiatives since the economic crisis hit in autumn 2008. The first in October 2008 saw the abolition of the only universal aspect of Irish health care with removal of medical cards for all over 70 year olds. The October 2008 budget and the supplementary budget in April 09 saw increased charges for public health services: with a rise in Emergency Department charges, increased public and private hospital bed charges, and increased payment out of pocket for drugs from €100 to €120 a month for the two thirds of the population without medical cards.

The December 2009 budget saw the removal of the only remaining aspect of universal health care for one third of population with the introduction of a 50 cent charge for prescriptions for medical card holders up to €10 per family per month. This may not seem like a lot of money but if you are living on social welfare or the minimum wage, this is a significant hole in your pocket. Plus all the international evidence shows that charging for essential drugs stops people who need them from using them.

The December 2009 budget also introduced pay cuts to public sector workers between 5% and 15%, depending on their level of pay.

Budgets 2009 and 2010 saw a 26% cut in capital budgets. This is very important as its the second year in a row that the capital budget has been significantly cut and will mean that many new planned buildings will not be built such as primary care centres and the new national rehabilitation hospital.

This budget also saw a 30% cut of the scheme for medical card holders to go to a private dentist.

Interestingly, in December 2009, there were more people with medical cards than ever before with 1,478,560 people (33% of population) covered by medical cards. We know that the medical cards are an effective pro poor measure and although inequalities in access to the public hospital system remain a manifest problem for public patients, larger coverage for medical cards is a positive outcome, albeit directly related to increased numbers of unemployed people. It is interesting to note to limiting medical card eligibility or capping the numbers of people covered by medical cards would be perhaps the easiest way to save money in the health budget. However, once the various u-turns and changes were made to the high profile issue of taking away medical cards for over 70 year olds, no further attempts to get additional savings from medical cards were attempted. Perhaps the wrath of older people protesting outside the Dail and in Westland Row Church put our political masters off touching medical cards for the foreseeable future. People power can work…

In terms of the HSE, there has been a continuous tightening of staffing and budgets since 2007. In September 2007, the HSE introduced a staff embargo. This has been achieved by restricting the use of contract staff, the non replacement of people on leave and retiring staff. Since March 2009, there has been a public sector wide embargo. Both of these have resulted in a consistent reduction in staff from 113,000 to 110,000, many of whom are frontline staff and about 1,000 of whom are nurses. There has also been a range of Value for Money (VfM) measures introduced across the HSE to garner savings such as bans on using hotel facilities for meetings, restricting travel and conference attendance’s, a 3% year on year cut in administration costs. While many of these make sense, the non replacement of front line staff can result in nurses having less time to spend with patients, while the restrictions on travel can result in home helps reducing the number of visits to a person in need of care. I have heard examples of managers of home helps asking them to reduce their visits to people in order to bring down mileage costs which result in a adults having their colostomy bag or nappies changed less frequently, all in the name of Value for Money.

Also Budget 2010 allowed for the introduction of the Financial Emergency Measures legislation which was passed in May 2010 and allowed government to cut professionals’ contracts by eight per cent. This legislation allowed the Department of Health to reduce cut in pharmacy fees by 24-34%, and to other professionals such as GPs of eight per cent.

Also in February 2010, Minister Mary Harney announced a 40% price cut for the 300 most common patent drugs. These cuts introduced in 2009 and 2010 to privately practising professionals and drug companies, prompts the question ‘why on earth were we paying such high prices for the previous ten years’? A question our Minister for Health refuses to answer.

Simultaneous to these budgetary impacts on health, there are three other broader trends in health services which are happening. These include:

1. A shift from inpatient hospital care to day cases and from hospital to the community – this makes sense in that most of us would prefer our care closer to home but problematic if its been used as a cost cutting initiative which it is. And also if its happening out of sync – eg closing hospitals beds and there are over 1, 300 fewer beds in the system now than there was a year ago without beefing up primary and community care services. Its very hard or impossible to build up primary and community services in the absence of funding and staff – neither of which are available at the moment.
2. The increased privatisation of health and social care. This has happened in a range of ways in last ten years which means now that one in three hospital beds are in private for profit sector, while two out of three nursing home beds are in the private, largely for-profit sector. The so-called ‘Fair Deal’ scheme assists this large scale privatisation of care for older people, with little or no rear guard action against it, because it has been cleverly couched in very complicated legislation. Over the last decade there has also been a large scale ‘outsourcing’ ie privatisation of many aspects of health services known as ‘hotel’ facilities. These include cleaning, catering, security in hospitals. Also the National Treatment Purchase Fund diverts €90 million of public money in to the private for-profit sector as a mechanism for reducing long waits for public patients in public hospitals, instead of investing in the public system and resolving the problems there. There is widespread use of private management consultancy firms across the health system, of agency staff despite or because of the embargo and increased dependence on public private partnerships for building primary care teams and co-locating hospitals. The HSE is increasingly dependent on ‘public-private partnerships’ (PPPs) in the absence of public money for public facilities.
3. A complete failure to address our divisive, unequal system of care. This is most evident in the continued unequal access to public hospital care which privileges private patients over public patients. The two tier nature of hospital care allows private patients to skip the queue in to the public hospitals ahead of public patients and then 80% of their care is subsidised by public money. In fact you could argue that the two tier nature of the Irish health system has been further institutionalised through the new consultants’ contract. The new consultants’ contract was meant to introduce public only contract but in fact just 30% of consultants are on public only contracts, plus it now punishes hospitals who have public-only consultants. As long as doctors and hospitals are paid a fee for every private patient and a lump sum no matter how many or few public patients they see in public hospitals private patients will be treated quicker. Plus we have seen in the Tallaght x ray and unopened letters debacle, that it is public patients whose x rays were not reported,  it is public patients whose letters for referrals from GPs were not opened nor read nor followed up.

In the decade we had most we further institutionalised unequal health care. Does this bode well for what we do when we have less?

Possible Areas for Action
In terms of what can be done to turn the tide, to have a universal, quality public health system, here are a few ideas:

• Hold on to what we have in terms of public health and social service provision – don’t run it down anymore, build on areas of progress;
• Put all public money in to public health services. Stop diverting money into private for-profit health care;
• Campaign for an imminent end to two tier health system so that access is based on need not ability to pay;
• Campaign for universal health care, starting with primary care – free care for all children under six would be a good start;
• Identify areas where savings could be made – more use of generic drugs, cut consultants salaries, invest in public health to keep people well and health, invest in primary care and community care, allocate money according to need…

It can and should be different. Irish people are entitled to what all other European countries provide – a quality, universal public health system.

Sara Burke is a journalist, author, broadcaster and health policy analyst. Her book ‘Irish Apartheid. Healthcare Inequality in Ireland’ was published by New Island in 2009. Her blog is www.saraburke.com

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The Main Issues Facing Migrant Women in Ireland

Nusha Yonkova

The Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI) is an independent human rights organisation that advocates for the rights of immigrants and their families and acts as a catalyst for public debate and policy change. The ICI is also a licensed law centre that provides free legal aid and representation.

Since its establishment the ICI had a clear priority to provide support and legal services to migrants at risk. Over the years it became clear that the overwhelming majority of most of those vulnerable immigrants in need of support were female. As a result the ICI developed its expertise in the area of migration in order to meet the requirements of migrant women fleeing domestic violence, victims of crime and particularly those who are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Along these particular services, we provide legal advice in relation to applications for family reunification, long-term residence and citizenship, all of these identified as the most important issues encountered by the thousands of immigrants accessing the ICI telephone helpline.

The current economic situation in Ireland fuels the vulnerabilities experienced by migrant families, and as a result the situation of migrant women in particular has become more complex and their problems more imminent. Among the likely scenarios pertaining to female migrants in nowadays Ireland are poverty, job loss, wage decreases, all of which impact directly on the level of remittances sent to their home countries. Bearing in mind the vital role these remittances play, one could imagine the consequential negative impact on those family members expecting money earned in Ireland. Women from Asia in particular are important long distance supporters to families in their countries of origin.

Another direct result from the unfolding economic crisis has been the prevalence of the hidden/unregulated jobs. Women are inclined to accept any type of job and any rate of payment, when they lose their employment. At the perspective to lose their immigration status and to risk travelling back home without a visa to return they shut up and put up with any type of exploitative job offer. Despite the State’s efforts to regulate immigrant’s employment through work permits, the reality is that during such volatile labour market, it is extremely hard to hold on to one’s job. Additionally, with a lack of mobility the right to switch to another employment pushes women in the black market as cleaners, house assistance, child minders, agricultural workers, just to name a few.

Very sadly, another likely scenario for desperate migrant women, like many desperate local women in the past, is to turn either alone or more likely to be recruited into the sex industry in an attempt to temporarily “fix” their dire economic state of affairs. The ICI recently published a research on trafficking of migrant women and girls into the Irish sex industry, which showed that up to 97% of women in the indoor sex industry are migrants. The sexual exploitation and violence they experience are horrific, and the life long consequences, including health impact are simply unacceptable. It is very unfortunate that the current legislation, which appears to be blatantly inadequate, tolerates the indoor sex industry. One can purchase sex with impunity, which in practice means that one can purchase migrant women from the poorest countries without any consequences. Other countries around Europe have been affected in a similar way and are currently revisiting their outdated prostitution regulating regimes. It is time, we do the same.

It comes to no one’s surprise that the economic crisis fuels domestic violence in families. What makes the situation of migrant women worse is the dependent immigration status they often hold. This affects their permission to reside in the State, which sometimes depends on a ‘good relationship’ with an abusive husband or partner. In contrast with other European jurisdictions, the Dept of Justice and Law Reform refuses to introduce provisions for autonomous residence permits to women and children affected by domestic violence. The direct consequence of this approach is that migrant women in Ireland are forced to endure abuse for more longer than anyone else in the country out of pure fear to become illegal if their separate from their abuser.

The issues of dependent immigration status has another important dimension, in that it does not allow the holder to work, study or access any service in the State. This means that if an accompanying migrant wife wishes to also work, she has to apply for a full work permit as anybody else attempting to access Ireland for the purposes of employment. This means that this category of dependent wives have to compete for the scarce jobs with highly qualified male and other migrants coming from abroad. It is not an overstatement to say that dependent migrant wives are rarely successful. The spousal work permit, which benefitted many migrant women was abolished a couple of years ago. Presently, migrant women in dependent situation are suffering more than just from loss of employment opportunities. Firstly, they are forced to live in poverty, which often mares one-income families, and secondly the power balance within the family is often distorted because of the inferior status women hold, deeming them unproductive and unhelpful for their own families. It is not surprising that even in families where the migrant wife holds the work permit, violence is often existence because of the frustration experienced by the dependent husband, resulting in the same – more abuse for migrant women.

Access to services in Ireland is a subject to the so called test for Habitual Residence. Dependent migrant wives who do not meet this condition are prevented from accessing services when domestic violence occurs. Even though women refuges offer emergency accommodation, migrant women who do not have their own independent right to be in the State have to return to the abuser very soon because of the habitual residence requirement. Migrant women who have worked and paid contributions, meet the habitual residence condition, which essentially means they can access unemployment assistance or sick benefits. However, if they lose their employment they maybe unable to extend their residence stamp, which will put an end to the support they receive from the state.

Because of the uncertainties associated with the temporary immigration status related to employment, all migrants endeavour to achieve more permanent immigration status. For women who have been fortunate to work in Ireland, this might happen after 7 years and it is called long-term residence. Migrant workers apply after 5 years of employment and wait for about 2 years for processing. However, only those who have not had any employment breaks and have not used state assistance, including sick leave, can be approved for long term residence.

Citizenship through naturalisation remains a possibility for those who have lived legally for between 7 and 8 years, and roughly the same requirements apply. The applicants must never get sick, lose employment and have to show that they are of good character. Parking tickets and minor traffic offences are considered by the decision makers within the Dept of Justice and Law Reform detrimental for the applicant’s character and results in refusals of applications.

Uncertainty of the legal status and lack of clear avenues for long-term residence affects migrant women’s chances to integrate and develop a sense of belonging to the place. The constant struggle with not simply unjust but often peculiar regulations can be exhaustive and leads to bitterness and isolation.

A way forward, in these dire economic times, would be to ease the stranglehold of immigration regulations and give migrant women a chance to lawfully survive the crisis and await better times together with the main population. This is the only way to ensure an environment for integration and dignity for migrant women and their families

Nusha Yonkova is Anti-trafficking Coordinator at the Immigrant Council of Ireland

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Liberating Learning: Feminist Re-Readings in Liberal Education

Brid Connolly

Introduction

The Butterfly Effect, which signifies the interconnectedness of all aspects of a system, focuses on small changes which have enormous unintended consequences on distant aspects of the system. Irish society has had direct experience of this butterfly effect, but on a massive scale, over the past few years, which has had catastrophic influences on all aspects of our system. The keystone of this system is education. In order to understand the catastrophe, to transform it, and to build a fair and equal future we need to conduct a close examination of education as a social institution. This paper endeavours to briefly examine the role of education in society, using Anne Good’s model as a contextual framework, and analyse its place in the current social climate. It positions adult and community education vis-à-vis the mainstream provision, holding up a mirror to illuminate the deficits of that provision. It continues with the feminist infiltration of adult and community education and finally, it aims to show where the hopes and aspirations of egalitarian educators and activists can find the route to a better society.

Context

The story of education in Ireland is imbued myth and legend. We present ourselves as a highly educated, progressive population, with our disproportionate representation in the international literary, artistic and entrepreneurial ranks. The real story is a woeful contrast, with high levels of adult literacy difficulties, but also the failure of the system to substantially re-distribute the wealth, benefits and resources throughout the population.

Gramsci’s work on ideological hegemony illuminates the role of education in perpetuating the set of beliefs and values which serve the dominant ruling classes, including those benefiting from the patriarchical dividend. He separates two distinct strands of control: domination, by direct coercion, such as the legal system; and hegemony, in which the values, attitudes, morality which are shared by the entire society, with the help, among other institutions, of education (Burke, 2005). In education

The functionalist analysis of education illuminates its role in socialisation and preparation for work, but also in developing national and wider cultural identities. Further, it has a major allocative function, to distribute jobs, professions, social positions to individual people, based on their capabilities (Tovey and Share, 2003: 199). The heart of this functionalist analysis centres on meritocracy, where the ‘best’, that is, the hardest working, most intelligent young people automatically do well in education and consequently get the better jobs and the leadership roles in Irish society. This notion of meritocracy is ultimately flawed, as it completely ignores the power, control and resources that maintain the highly stratified, unequal nature of society. Thus, for example, people with money can literally buy education with grinds and private schooling, while simultaneously convincing themselves (and the wider society) that they are in the equal opportunities meritocracy. Further, a Marxist analysis explicitly highlights the role of education in transmitting capitalist ideology, especially around private property, individualism and private enterprise (Tovey and Share, 2003: 200). This is an echo of Gramsci’s (1971) analysis of the role of education in perpetuating the prevailing hegemony.  This can readily be seen with enterprise modules in Transition Year curricula, and the overall individualist nature of the examination system, hugely important for any analysis of inequality in society.

This inequality in relation to gender persists in spite of forty years of the second wave of the women’s movement. Education remains a key site for the transmission of dominant discourses around femininity and masculinity, within the consequent patriarchal power structures. It is often argued that because girls and young women achieve academically in school, that the education system is therefore promoting the status of women and equality in society. For example, girls are now attaining higher grades in the sciences and mathematics than their counterparts in the sixties, due to the fundamental change in perspective that girls were not scientifically minded, while boys’ grades did not change dramatically. Lynch maintains that this argument ignores the liberal orthodoxy that underpins the entire system of education, and is hardly a challenge to the individualist model that exists, which cannot deliver a collective emancipation without serious reform (1999:134). The key flaw within liberal ideology is that individuals are held responsible for social failures. Thus, women’s experience of oppression and discrimination in the private and public domains is put down to bad luck or personal failure, rather than structural inequity. Issues such as the lack of childcare, employment in low-paid sectors, domestic violence, and so on, that disproportionately impact on women’s lives, framed as personal problems or choices, not social concerns.

Thus, this educational context underpins the story of education in Ireland, and the ways in which the state developed the hegemony that underpins the cultural identity in the new state, with the new patriarchal hierarchy inserted in place of British rule.

Historical Development

Ireland has relied significantly on non-statutory agencies, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, to provide education prior to the establishment of the Vocational Educational Committee in the nineteen thirties. The remit of this VEC statutory provision was in the vocational stratum, while the professional stratum remained in the hands of the religious, by and large. This, of course, has changed, but the foundation of modern Irish society was thus: the elite professional classes emanating from this system were Catholic liberally educated men, while the working classes were educated in technical subjects, up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. Girls, within these two distinct provisions, were almost invisible, were consigned, as they were by the prevailing hegemony, to domestic lives within the private domain, spending a short time in the public domain between leaving school and marriage, in stratified occupations, such as domestic servants, nurses, teachers and secretaries. As such, that private domestic sphere became the key site of struggle in the evaluation of the status of women in society.

The advent of free post-primary education 1967 coincided with the second wave women’s movement, yet in many ways, developed completely in separate spheres.  More poor people were able to stay on in education, after primary school, but the numbers of people continuing on to higher education were significantly from the middle classes rather than the working classes. Similarly, the provision of free higher education in 1996, while aiming to increase the participation of working classes, has not witnessed a substantial shift in a full demographic attendance. Indeed, the economic boom saw a great divide between rich and poor in Irish society, and these liberal initiatives are based on the traditional response to inequality, that of equality of opportunity, albeit within a centre-right ideological regime. Nevertheless, the dividend from free education has been beneficial to women’s participation in society. However, it is still far from full equality. Adult and community education has been more successful in addressing the liberation of women than mainstream education.

Adult and Community Education

Adult and community education has developed over a long period of time in Ireland. In Connolly, (2009) I reviewed the development of workers’ education provided by the trade union movement from the early part of the twentieth century, to the Catholic response in the forties and fifties. Ryan et al (2009) looked at the nature of emancipatory and liberatory adult education, shaped by liberation movements, in contrast to a more redemptive provision shaped by the traditional Roman Catholic Church. The struggle between these two strands have their origins in the sources, with the labour movement provision more congruent with the specific identification of the issue of adult literacy difficulties, influenced by the Freirean model from South America in the late seventies, and transmitted in many instances by radical Catholic clergy and nuns. The appointment of Adult Education Organisers/Officers, AEOs, in 1979 saw the eventual emergence of self-financing adult education provision, which helped to make adult education accessible to a wider population, mirroring the provision in the liberal arts from the universities, the People’s College, Muintir na Tíre and the Irish Country Women’s Association, and so on. Thus, the years from 1979 onwards saw a fundamental shift in adult education in Ireland, laying the foundations for the emergence in the 80s and early nineties, the movement which became known as women’s community education, analogous to the women’s movement. This drew on the resources of supportive AEOs, the radical Freirean adult educators and women’s studies practitioners. As such, it differed fundamentally from the mainstream education system, both in the processes and content of the learning programmes and environments.

Underpinning Philosophy

The amalgamation of several strands of theory and practice combines to shape women’s community education. Ideologically, the sources are new social movements, critical pedagogy and feminism (Connolly, 2007). Like the women’s movement, it draws on group dynamics to create the learning environment that ensures that everyone in the learning group, including the educator, is equally important, and has a contribution to make. It starts where people are at, in that it enables participants to look at their own experience and to analyse this experience critically. Community educators are crucial to the process of critical analysis, and they enable the group members to transform their reflections into action. Freire called this cycle of reflection and action praxis, (Freire, 1972).

Critical pedagogy stems from Freire’s work (1972), and it has a specific intention to emancipate learners through education. Underlying this intention is a direct challenge to liberal education (Giroux, 2010), but critical pedagogy has hardly any impact at primary and second levels, and it is utterly constrained at third level, with the emphasis on canonical, theoretical knowledge and elitism. bell hooks (1994) quickly identified that Freire has no gender analysis, and just as quickly remedied it with her own work, to contribute to the hugely powerful trends in feminist pedagogy.

The role of feminist pedagogy includes ‘really useful knowledge’, the fundamental challenge to canonical knowledge and promotion of knowledge for politicisation (Thompson, 1996). The key challenge to canonical knowledge is in the promotion of experiential knowledge, starting where people are at, when they return to learning through community education. Thus, women’s community education succeeds in being dynamic, innovative and progressive, an ideal that sets the standard for all education across the board.

Critical Allies

Community education developed in parallel with the radical models of community development. This model developed particularly in the 1980s and 90s, as a response to otherwise intractable issues, such as unemployment, poverty, drug misuse, and so on (Powell, Geoghegan 2004). The trend for a communitarianist response to difficult social issues is notable in the USA, UK as well as Ireland, and could be seen as the ‘heart’ in the otherwise heartless neo-liberal hegemony (Connolly, 2007). However as a grassroots popular movement, community development has enabled people to take control over some aspects of their own lives, to understand the forces that create inequality and oppression and to collectively work against these forces.

The core principles of community development and community education coincide, and centre on a number of keystone processes. Ultimately, identifying a community’s own needs, by the members of the community is crucial. Working towards meeting those needs are next, but this must rely on building the capacity of the people, through community education, including formal, that is, accredited learning, with access to further and higher provision; non-formal, non-accredited learning, especially around personal development and interpersonal skills; and finally, informal learning when we learn from one another through dialogue, conversion, demonstration and so on, in our normal daily lives, outside the classroom. Finally, changing the status quo, which causes the social issues in the first place, while a slow process, remains an aspiration of community development and education, through the process of action and reflection, that is, praxis. .

Thus, the liberatory outcomes of radical community development are contingent on community education, the practice of reflection through education, and action, through community development.

The View from the Margins

What we can see since the milestone of free third level education is the strength of people with money to literally buy the advantages of education, through private schooling and grind schools, thus completely making a lie of the so-called meritocratic regime. Gramsci’s analysis of education as a social institution which perpetuates hegemony is a useful lens here. That is, the private good is promoted, against the public good. Simultaneously, we can clearly see the neo-patriarchal up-surge in the macho workplace and public space, with the status of women hardly shifting; indeed it is getting worse, especially in the light of the impact of the sex industry on cultural constructions of gender. We witness the relentless economic hyper-expansionism of the past fifteen years, with the source in the greed of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. The public purse has been rifled to fund private wealth creation, with tax breaks of course, but also with social policy around health and education, as well as housing.  That is, Third Way politics have dominated the Irish political landscape, with partnerships, committee governance, and so on, with the effect of subsuming left-wing influence. However, it is also useful to see the current suppression of participative democracy as a backlash, like the backlash against the women’s movement, showing the effectiveness of the community mobilisation in challenging the status quo.

The view from the margins shows that now, more than ever, people need to work collectively for ultimate change. Teachers and educators need to re-assign ourselves as cultural workers, rather than agents of the state, passing on the ideology without question. Adult and community education is a model for upper second level, and higher education, with the clear intention for emancipation, rather than economic progress. The community remains the most appropriate, exciting and fertile site for social change, a real challenge to the neo-liberal and neo-patriarchal hegemony, albeit against fierce opposition.

Robertson (1985), writing in the eighties, coined the phrase: the SHE future, the Sane, Humane and Ecological. This is the kind of future I want to work for.

References

Burke, B. (1999, 2005) ‘Antonio Gramsci, schooling and education’, the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm. accessed 23rd April 2010

Connolly, B., (2009) Praxis, Critical Pedagogy and Critical Adult and Community Education, EdD Thesis

Connolly, B., (2007) ‘Beyond the Third Way: New Challenges for Critical Adult and Community Education’, in Connolly, B., Fleming, T., McCormack, D., and Ryan, A., (eds) Radical Learning for Liberation, 2, MACE, Maynooth.

Freire, P., (1972) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Giroux., H., (2010) http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/~stevens/critped/giroux.htm accessed  23^rd April 2010

Gramsci, A., (1971) A Selection from Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, London.

hooks,  b., (1994) Education as Freedom, Routledge, New York

Lynch, K., (1999) Equality in Education, Gill and Mcmillan, Dublin

Powell, F., and Geoghegan, M., (2004) The Politics of Community Development, Reclaiming Civil Society or Reinventing Governance? Falmer, Dublin.

Robertson, J., (1985) Future Work: Jobs, Self-employment and leisure after the industrial age, http://www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm#futurework, accessed 23^rd April 2010

Ryan, A. B., Connolly, B., Grummell, B., and Finnegan, F., (2009) ‘Beyond Redemption? Locating the Experience of Adult Learners and Educators’ in The Adult Learner, The Journal of Adult and Community Education in Ireland, 2009, AONTAS, Dublin

Thompson, J., (1996) ‘“Really Useful Knowledge”: Linking Theory and Practice’ in Connolly, B., Fleming, T., McCormack, D., and Ryan, A., (eds) Radical Learning for Liberation, , MACE, Maynooth.

Tovey, H., and Share, P., (2003) A Sociology of Ireland, Second Edition, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin.

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The ‘Ship of Men’: Gender equality as a solution to this man-made crisis

Mary Murphy

Introduction

The feminist framework developed by Anne Good^[i] focuses on five key principles; holistic, gendered, challenging, the importance of the private and the public and the importance of feminist ethics informing policy and practice. Baker et al (2004)^[ii] make the case for a holistic understanding of equality which embraces not only income or resource inequality but also political, status and affective equalities. Nancy Fraser (1995)^[iii] draws attention to the relationship between redistribution, recognition and representation. This short input continues this tradition by making the links between women’s political inequality and this economic crisis. It draws attention to power and discourse, to media and public debate. It argues that absence of women in decision-making arenas contributed to a style of politics and economic governance that emphasised short-term greed over long-term care and well-being. It argues that responses to the present crisis should include governance measures to enhance and increase women’s involvement in all State and economic decision-making; this is a prerequisite to changing the substance of policy making and the outcomes that policy generates.

As other conference papers argue convincingly, women will inevitably suffer the burden of managing poverty and other forms of suffering caused by the crisis. This paper points to the fact that this crisis, is not just an inevitable crisis of capitalism, it is a crisis of a particular Irish style of patriarchy and an extreme version of neoliberal capitalism – in other words it is a man-made crisis. Pauline Conroy’s work (2009)^[iv] shows how a gender analysis of the crisis changes our understanding of it. This is important. Our understanding and analysis will frame our policy responses to recovery and restructuring. If women are not in the picture at the moment of the analysis they will not be there when solutions are designed and implemented. Conroy reviews the US sub prime mortgage market and shows how the twin banks Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac created ‘gendered’ sub prime products aimed at poor black women in the US. This lightly regulated sub market contributed significantly to the US banking crisis and the fall of Lehman brothers – commonly agreed to trigger the global fiscal crisis. Conroy goes further in gendering the story of crisis by analysing the gender profile of staff in those banks and showing an overwhelming gender divide between senior management (male) and service staff (female). She shows that the personal debt and credit experience poor black women and the hierarchical gendered structure of employment in the banking and financial industries are central to the story of US and global fiscal collapse. Her work draws attention to the need to gender the story of the Irish banking and fiscal crises.

Gendering the story of the Irish crisis

We need to gender the story of the Irish banks. There was no woman chief executive officer of the six Irish banks under the Irish government guarantee and of the six chairpersons there was only one woman (Gillian Bowler in Irish Nationwide Bank). A gender desegregation of banking and issues of access to credit might well throw light on the product segmentation of the Irish banking sector. Conroy points to the lack of access to credit for poor women and the growth of the Irish sub prime market in mortgages. There was only one woman out of the 12 board members of the Central Bank charged with regulating and safeguarding our banking system.

A famous landmark in the Irish story of the Irish banking crisis is that famous September 2008 midnight meeting in government buildings between our political and banking worlds. The banking and political actors in that room were exclusively male. No woman was among the senior Department of Finance officials or legal community advising the Irish government. Eugene McCague (chairman of Arthur Cox), provided the legal advice to Brian Cowen, Pádraig O’Riordan (managing partner of Arthur Cox) advised Brian Lenihan. The same firm advised Anglo Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland. Arthur Cox firm was also appointed legal adviser to Nama, the National Asset Management Agency. While 23 out of their 89 Dublin-based team are women so some women may be on these legal teams. There is one woman out of 12 in the senior management of the Department of Finance. Even those appointed by government to run the two-stage banking inquiry Professor Patrick Honohan, the Governor of the Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland and international banking experts Klaus Regling and Max Watson, are exclusively male.

It is instructive too to observe the narrative of the crisis through the 13 books written and published about it in 2009^[v]. The authors were from all walks: academics, journalists, politicians and international bankers but it is interesting that only two publications were co-authored by women (Kathy Sheridan and Martina Devlin). Why is it largely men telling our story? Penguin Books hosted a series of debates by four of the authors. It began with a 1,200 packed audience in the National Concert Hall titled ‘4 Angry Men’. Where, we might ask, were the angry women? There is an internal challenge to the feminist community, why are we not telling and writing our story?

The substantive content of these publications by and large documents the villains of the crisis: the bankers, the developers, the builders and the politicians. What is striking is the total invisibility of women in the story of the economic crisis who, with one or two exceptions, are mainly evident as wives, girlfriends and daughters of the men. No author problematises this lack of women in the picture and the failure to observe or analyse the patriachal hue of the picture they paint. Indeed instead of Ship of Fools Fintan O’Toole may well have titled his 2009 book Ship of Men.

If we look at the political and policy responses to the crisis we can also see a dearth of women in decision-making. The recent political economy of social policy is captured in the policy processes that produced the NAMA, the McCarthy Review on Public Expenditure and Public Sector Staffing Levels (McCarthy, 2009) and Budget 2010 and the Commission on Taxation (Ireland, 2009). The NWCI has already commented on the problematic and unsatisfactory gender composition of these key policy processes. Despite the crisis of social partnership the National Economic and Social Development Office (NESDO) remains as a site of response to the crisis. In previous work I pointed to the gender blind nature of the analysis in the Developmental Welfare State^[vi] and the less than satisfactory gender composition of the board of the National Economic and Social Council (NESC). Gender equality has always struggled for a fair hearing within social partnership and recent NESC publications and proposals for work on the crisis^[vii] continue to be relatively gender blind. Gender-specific, media and policy commentators continue to debate the nature of the crisis from the perspective of young males.

If we take public comment about economic policy as an illustration of the nature of public debate on the crisis we see again that it is highly gendered. Take the NAMA debate and use as an example the letter in the Irish Times (August 29^th 2009), we see only 14 per cent or seven of the 46 signatories are women. Similarly, a TASC^[viii] co-ordinated signed letter to the Irish Times (March 9t^h 2009) had only two women among the 28 signatories. Not surprising then that these letters or economic commentaries had no gender analysis.

An interesting trend in the Irish fiscal crisis has been the rise in the use of ‘blogging’ as a forum for political debate. A review of input from February 13^th to March 13^th 2010 into two Irish blogs shows disturbing trends; irisheconomy.ie has had no recent inputs form women. Indeed women only comprise 10 per cent or three out of thirty-two contributors. There are glass ceilings or hidden barriers for women attempting to enter this blog; it only accepts entries form established professional economists or those in economic departments of third level institutions. A review of inputs to the more inclusive blog progressiveeconomy.ie again shows no female contributions during the same timespan. This blog is moderated by a woman and she has actively sought women contributors. But only five non-staff women have ever contributed.  It appears not to matter whether the economic debate is neoliberal, mainstream or progressive, Irish women are not blogging about economics.

Bua (2009)^[ix] argues this is not unusual; rather the world of blogging appears to be another ‘patriarchal failure of discourse’ and to mirror the democratic deficits in the real world. Women are more likely to ‘lurk’, to watch and observe; those most likely to ‘flood’ or to make a disproportionate number of entries are men. The virtual world mirrors the gendered patterns of political participation and discourse in the real world. Bua notes the dominant online style of discourse is ‘assertive, authoritative, adverbial, sarcastic, and self promoting, the more subservient female style is shorter, more personally oriented tentative, apologetic and supportive’. No wonder, then, that women self exit mixed blogs and set up women-only blog spaces.

So far this paper suggests this is not just an economic or fiscal crisis – it is much much more. It is a crisis caused in equal part by our model of development, our neoliberal variety of crony capitalism and caused by our strange Catholic culture of patriarchy. It is a failure of our highly gendered constitutional and political features. When we look for solutions it is worth keeping this in mind. It is very interesting that when seeking solutions for its banking crisis, Iceland specifically addressed the need for gender balance. It is even more instructive to look at those countries that have weathered the crisis. It is little coincidence that countries with better evolved and more sustainable models of development, banking and politics lead the world for gender equality in decision making. Greater inequality leads to more gendered input into substantive policy making and more equal outcomes. This is better for everyone. Finland, a small ex colony on the edge of Europe offers a useful comparator for us to benchmark Irish women’s participation in political and economic decision making. EU averages are also given

Fig 1

Irish women’s political/economic participation benchmarked against Finland and EU

	Ireland	Finland	EU average
% of members of national parliaments	13	48	24
% Women ministers	20	60	26
% Women as board members in publicly quoted companies	8	24	12
% Women as president of publicly quoted companies	5	8	3
% Women on boards of central banks	8	31	18
% women public administration level one	19	36	25

What is striking about the many books on the crisis is not their prescription for economic recovery. It is that commentators who diverge ideologically all agree that changes in political and corporate governance institutions are at the heart of implementing any solution to the crisis. Gendering this debate is vital but has not yet been achieved. Research shows that where women are present they make a difference to the substantive policy agenda, the nature of the policy process and dialogue and the actual outcomes. In arguing for women in politics we need not defend the indefensible. We remember Margaret Thatcher. We know the contribution of our own ‘three wise women’ Ministers: Mary Harney, Mary Hanafin and Mary Coughlan. Between them the three Marys govern the governance and policy debacle we call FAS, the recent policy initiative to privatise pensions, nursing homes and health care, and the recent initiative to make work mandatory for lone parents who are mothers of teenagers.

It is not a woman who will make a difference but a gendered redistribution of power to women will. A critical mass of women in all places of governance will make the difference. To the non gendered demands for new republic and constitutional and political reform must be added gender candidate quotas in national and local elections and a 40 per cent statutory mandatory gender balance on all state boards and private boards. There is also a need to develop and use policy tools that enable us to gender desegregate the impacts of policy choices. Subjecting An Bord Snip recommendations to a policy proofing process that includes a gender impact assessment might well reframe decision making. Requiring all national budgets to have a gender budget statement might draw public attention to the gendered distribution of policy and resources allocation.

Gendering economic debate offers ways to reframe the crisis as an opportunity for gender equality. It also helps us respond more effectively to threats to gender equality^[x]. These come in two dimensions. The late Ted Kennedy observed in the US Senate (2008:2 cited in Smith 2009) that women’s vulnerability in economic downturns has received too little focus. Women ultimately bear the burden of cuts and poverty; they manage debt and bear the stress of household and child poverty. There is also the need to be aware of the variety of women’s needs, experiences and situations that policy must address – some women are more threatened by recession. Women’s different relationship to the labour market mean falling employment rates for women are not necessarily accompanied by similar rises in unemployment rates; there may be pressure or barriers for women attempting to sign on the live register or claimant count. Workers in or having had atypical jobs are also more likely to be excluded from unemployment benefit systems since they may have broken employment histories or may not have made sufficient contributions – this has longer term pension implications but short-term benefit implications. An analysis that focuses on the live register as the political manifestation of unemployment will inevitably focus more on male and young male unemployment. This has worrying implications for equality agenda.

The second threat is more ideological in nature. Smith (2009) observes that in previous recessions (US in the 1930s, Finland in the 1990s), policy responses did row back progress in women’s participation in labour market employment. It is obvious that the agenda of cutting community development infrastructure, decreasing welfare rates and the minimum wage was a pre-recession political agenda. Recession is an ideal smokescreen for ideologues to pursue policies that hijack and downgrade equality issues in the national policy agenda to ‘a luxury we cannot afford’.

However there is also reason to hope. Smith (2009) observes that recession offers opportunities to achieve European goals of high employment and equality. There are opportunities to argue creatively that increasing women’s employment and economic participation is a perquisite of economic recovery. The labour market is still highly gendered. Debate about its responses to the crisis needs to reflect the gendered reality of the recession’s impact. The difference in the types of jobs that women and men do shapes the impact of the recession and should shape our policy responses; different policy responses will benefit or disadvantage different groups.

Smith (2009) shows it is possible to have a highly sophisticated analysis of gender equality and recession. It should be possible to advance gender equality as a recovery strategy, as a parallel strategy to other investment strategies in a smart economy or green technologies that seeks to modernise the physical infrastructure. Conversely arguing for stimulus spending for investment in public services like health, transport education and housing or more general investment in services and infrastructure is also an investment for gender equality.

A gender input into and analysis of a recovery plan are essential for recovery. This will not happen without bringing women’s voice into all economic and political decision-making arenas.

Mary Murphy is Lecturer in Irish Politics and Society, Department of Sociology, NUI, Maynooth