ABSTRACT
At the time of writing (November 2012) about four and a half years have passed since the ‘Great Recession’ officially began in Europe. The recession is still in process, with the latest statistics having recently certified that the Eurozone entered a second output dip while employment in the EU as a whole is still hovering around bottom values since 2008. Any assessment of the impact of the recession is thus bound to be a provisional exercise. It is especially provisional from the gender and labour market perspective adopted in this chapter, since the second employment dip is being driven by the so-called fiscal consolidation of public budgets which is feared to disproportionately affect female labour but whose effects have not yet fully materialized.
