ABSTRACT
Girls and women have gained visibility as political and economic actors of consequence, albeit in ways that have raised concerns about emergent corporate, neoliberal, market, or managerial feminisms. This book opened by articulating the uneasy sense that feminist efforts to put gender equality on to the global agenda have been transformed by conservative and neoliberal forces. The forms of gender equality governance that are characteristic of the "Gender Equality as Smart Economics" agenda must be understood as a distinct set of governance interventions that take women as idealized neoliberal subjects and seek to shape their behavior accordingly. Human capital logics are influential across the geographical and ideological spectrum, underpinning a range of governance interventions across the world. Smart Economics discourses in gender equality policymaking are one area of influence, but by no means the only one. The form of female agency it offers, however, is a profoundly truncated and individualized agency that is antithetical to feminist solidarity and collective action.
