ANTI-GENDER BACKLASH & DEMOCRATIC PUSHBACK

Project Information

PushBackLash

Grant agreement ID: 101061687

DOI

10.3030/101061687

Project closed

EC signature date 9 June 2022

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 2 168 131,25

EU contribution

€ 2 158 756,00

Coordinated by

PARIS-LODRON-UNIVERSITAT SALZBURG
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PushBackLash (ANTI-GENDER BACKLASH & DEMOCRATIC PUSHBACK)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Gender equality has never been so high on the European Union (EU)’s and the United Nation (UN)’s agendas. While feminists across Europe and the world have achieved significant – albeit slow – progress during the last decades, we are currently witnessing a changed and changing reality in Europe and beyond: since the 2010s, anti-feminist and anti-gender gender discourses have proliferated, both online and offline. Gender equality is a precondition for democracy and as such it is also central to the Union’s existence and its future development. Against this background, our project proposes a solid democratic pushback against the backlash.

PUSH*BACK*LASH has five specific objectives:
1) To engender democratic theory from an intersectional perspective
2) To understand anti-gender discursive strategies and backlash tactics & assessing their effects
3) To identify best strategies for countering anti-gender discourses and strengthening democratic values and practices, taking into account the role played by parties, social media and public opinion.
4) To developing solutions, policy recommendations and context-sensitive tools for engendering democratic spaces from an intersectional perspective
5) To co-create and disseminating knowledge for gender equality

To reach these objectives, PUSH*BACK*LASH studies political actors, their agendas, and strategies that promote anti-gender equality in the European Union, using a large methodological palette – surveys, experiments, interviews, and focus groups, collecting data on public opinion, parties, government agendas, discourses on social media (X) in order to develop solutions on how to effectively counteract these anti-gender equality and anti-democratic discourses.

The project designs and empirically tests counter-strategies to overcome the pushback against gender equality and democracy in Europe and seeks to equip pro-equality actors with practical toolkits for responding to anti-gender equality discursive strategies and backlash tactics. Toolkits and solutions are co-created with civil society partners. Policy briefs and findings will be disseminated to politicians. Cartoons will be disseminated to schools to strengthen pro-gender equality and inclusive attitudes. Podcasts and videos are geared to capture attention of citizens, and theater of the oppressed interventions will be designed and tested to be used with students.

The project brings together civil society activists, EU experts, and multidisciplinary researchers from 11 universities and organizations in Europe.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work carried out in the first year across eight working packages has focused on developing a theoretical framework and collecting primary data as well as assessing and harmonizing existing data.

The team of six partners worked on the development of project's theoretical framework in the first months of the project. Their report is available on https://pushbacklash.eu/dissemination.

The team from WP2, comprised of five partners, has developed a survey questionnaire that addresses the formation and correlates of anti-feminist, misogynistic, and anti-gender equality, and anti-democratic attitudes as well as finalized the focus groups guidelines to understand how the public thinks of democracy, gender equality, and feminism. Additionally, the team downloaded 24 waves of the relevant survey questionnaires from ESS, EVS, ISSP, and EB and assessed which theories can be tested, using existing survey items, as well as began survey data harmonization.

The team in WP3, consisting of six partners, has retrieved the data from parties, legislatures, and the judiciary agendas in 10 countries spanning 12 years and is now in the process of manually coding these agendas and running reliability tests to map attention to anti-gender equality issues across space and time.

The lead team in WP4 with support from the partners identified prominent pro and anti-gender equality actors in the EU and UK and then scraped their X accounts, producing the dataset with 60,000 observations, which was deposited at GESIS. The partners also supported the University of Amsterdam, who leads this work package, with the manual coding of X observations.

The team in WP5 have also assessed measures of intersectionality in existing questionnaires collected by WP2.

WP7 researched strategies to counteract anti-gender backlash. Their results can be found in the preliminary report on https://pushbacklash.eu/dissemination.

WP8 team ran a pilot study in Austria to examine whether public discourse in policy debate, public documents, and media that discussed Covid-19 policies of lockdowns and school closures in 2020 and 2021 was gendered and whether it reinforced traditional gender roles as well as collected relevant secondary data on Covid-19 and assessed whether and how these data can be used to study the gendered impact of the pandemic. Existing data was used to conduct in-depth analysis of the gendered impact of the pandemic in Austria and Italy. First results were reported in the policy brief that can be found on https://pushbacklash.eu/dissemination.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Preliminary findings from the research include:

1) EU citizens’ attitudes towards women in positions of power and responsibility have improved since 2009. However, about 1/3 of EU citizens would not feel comfortable with an LGBTQI+ person in the highest position of power.
2) Gender norms remain a factor behind the gender gap in political involvement in EU-27 Member States and the UK.
3) An in-depth analysis of Austrian longitudinal survey data revealed a re-traditionalization of women’s gender role attitudes due to Covid-19 pandemic policies in Austria.
4) An in-depth analysis of Italian longitudinal survey data revealed that Covid-19 policies moderated changes in trust in political institutions and risk preferences of employed mothers in Italy.
5) An in-depth analysis of family policies in Hungary revealed their discriminatory character.
6) Preliminary results from the analysis of X (formerly Twitter) data show variation in anti-gender equality actors’ positions on gender issues, the topics they engage with, and the strategies they use. These preliminary findings suggest that it appears that there is no “monolithic” anti-gender equality movement on social media platform X.
7) Multiple context-specific strategies to counteract anti-gender discourses have emerged in EU-27 Member States and the UK, illustrating the need to tailor approaches to the unique challenges and opportunities in each country, with the EU serving as a model and a champion of change in the field of gender equality.

Please see "Anti-gender backlash in Europe: First findings and recommendations policy brief" available at https://pushbacklash.eu/dissemination/