Feminist Perspectives on Social Policy - Global Conversations

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, across highly diverse socio-political and economic contexts, placed renewed emphasis on a persistent and globally shared reality: the endurance of gender inequalities.The pandemic not only intensified existing disparities in health outcomes, access to healthcare, employment, income security, and exposure to gender-based violence, but also made visible the centrality of care work and social reproduction for the functioning of economies and societies (Naumann et al. 2022).At the same time, recent years have been marked by growing political contestation over women's rights, including restrictions on reproductive rights and access to education, alongside the rise of anti-gender discourse.These developments underline the urgency of revisiting feminist perspectives on social policy in a global context.Gender inequality remains one of the most pervasive and structurally embedded forms of social inequality worldwide.Despite significant advancements in education and formal rights, women continue to experience lower labour market participation, higher levels of precarious employment, and persistent wage gaps.At the same time, women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and care work, and when paid and unpaid work are combined, often work longer hours than men.Inequalities are further evident in access to healthcare, exposure to violence, and representation in political and economic decision-making (Chancel et al. 2026).Importantly, these patterns do not follow a linear trajectory towards equality; rather, they reflect ongoing tensions between expansion of rights and processes of retrenchment and backlash, as recently witnessed regarding the curtailing of abortion rights in the USA, and drastic reduction of women's civil and social rights in Afghanistan.Feminist scholarship has long demonstrated that these inequalities are not merely outcomes of markets or cultural norms but are deeply embedded within social policy arrangements.