"Green Economy" is a topic that has so far been related mainly to goods production and energy supply, but less to services. Although the entire area of caring and providing (care economy) and personal services - paid and unpaid - is a basic prerequisite of any economy, this less visible part of the economy is hardly taken into account even in the current Green Economy discussions and concepts. Moreover, it is primarily medium-sized and larger companies that are concerned with the Green Economy. However, 97.7% of all businesses in Germany fall into the category of micro and small enterprises (up to 49 employees), of which micro enterprises (up to 9 employees) in turn account for 90% (own calculations).

In particular, the companies and startups of women – which are almost exclusively found in the category of small and micro enterprises – often already have a pioneering role in the integration of environmental protection and care work in their companies (see).

Main gender dimensions

The lack of thematization of care economy/care work has already been mentioned above. This strikes in two ways: first, with respect to unpaid family care and custodial work, and second, with respect to underpaid and undervalued paid care, child-rearing, educational work, and provision of necessities. These shortcomings are detailed in two papers of ours (both in German: Background Paper on the Relationship between Care and Green Economy 2012, Sustainable Economy at the Nexus of Gender, Care and Green Economy 2014).

In Green Economy, the labor economy dimension is reflected, among other things, in the concept of 'just transition' to a climate and environmentally sound economy. The fact that care work occupations are also left out of consideration here does not need to be mentioned again. The focus is on rather male-dominated fields of work, with high CO₂ emissions and resource consumption, such as the steel and car industry or energy production in all its facets. Often, the focus is on technical and/or craft occupational areas. Here, there needs to be a much greater focus on other working time models that allow for fairly shared care work. So far, there has also been a lack of connection of the conceptions and discussions to the occupational areas in which there is a large and increasing shortage of personnel, such as nursing and care for the elderly.

The lack of consideration of care work as well as the small and rather service-oriented enterprises of women lead to the fact that their power of definition and decision-making is also low in the field of the Green Economy. This applies to women entrepreneurs' ability to influence political decision-making and decisions on green, sustainable investments, but also to environmentally and climate-friendly supply and household work and corresponding consumption and goes hand in hand with the cross-cutting dimension of symbolic order. This can be seen in this topic area, among other things, in the evaluation of companies, whose importance and influence increases the larger and more technically oriented they are. This becomes particularly clear in times of crisis (e.g. the Corona pandemic, the banking crisis), when the financial support available to small and microenterprises, but especially to the solo self-employed, is low and associated with high bureaucratic hurdles. Gender stereotypes are also reflected here, which tend to see women as additional earners rather than family breadwinners.

Selected Publications

• Why the European Green Deal needs ecofeminism
  This report by the EEB & WECF (2021) highlights the gender deficits and opportunities of the European Green Deal, the EU's flagship policy. It demonstrates that gender issues, although influencing environmental policy and vice versa, have not been integrated into the European Green Deal. The publication provides recommendations for moving from gender-blind to gender-transformative environmental policies. These include intersectional and gender-responsive environmental goals, moving toward a feminist economics of well-being and care, and ensuring the use of gender mainstreaming strategies in environmental policy.
• Good work? Sustainable work and sustainable development: a critical gender perspective from the Global North
  Work has just recently been recognized as an important topic in the discourse of development. But often it stays unclear how work is related to issues of gender equality, an indispensable goal of sustainable development from its start. The 2018 article by Beate Littig explores how gender and work is addressed in three approaches to work and sustainable development, which are currently discussed in the German language literature on this topic: in the current mainstream concept of the green economy and green jobs, in alternative concepts of degrowth or postgrowth societies and in eco-feminist concepts of caring societies. The critical discussion of these approaches leads to the argument that a fundamental reassessment and reorganization of the critical society-nature relationship and consequently a new conceptualization of sustainable work is needed.
• A new green learning agenda
  Not decidedly on the topic of the Green Economy or Green New Deal, but as an essential foundation for it, the publication 'A new green learning agenda: Approaches to quality education for climate action from a feminist perspective' details three approaches to green learning:
  Specific capacity development is needed to ensure that technical education and training addresses an equitable transition to a green economy through a gender-transformative approach. Girls and women who are already excluded from the current economy will be left on the margins of a green economy unless deliberate efforts are made to make green technical and vocational education and training initiatives more gender equitable and gender transformative.
  Generic capacity development aims to build "green life skills" with the goal of lasting green behavior by focusing on a critical, intersectional, and equity-oriented agenda in climate change education (CCE) and education for sustainable development (ESD). Here, the experiences of girls and women are important for the resulting behaviors to become more gender equitable.
  Developing transformative capacity and skills for green transformation is the most radical and important of the three approaches. Here, the aim is to change mindsets and address underlying structures of inequality and systems of oppression. Only by actively reducing gender inequality can the foundation be laid for the social transformation needed to achieve the 1.5°C climate change target.
• How a feminist degrowth approach can alleviate ecological and gender injustices
  Is it possible to reconcile sustainable development, a fair distribution of paid and unpaid work among genders, and an economic strategy based on growth? In their article "The Monetized Economy versus Care and the Environment? Degrowth Perspectives on Reconciling an Antagonism," Corinna Dengler and Beate Strunk argue that the growth paradigm perpetuates existing inequities between gender and the environment. In their article, they offer degrowth as a potential approach for a Feminist Ecological Economics perspective that could pave the way to a ‘caring economy’. However, according to the authors, in order to live up to this potential, degrowth must necessarily become more feminist.
  An open access shortened version of the article is available here.

We would like to refer to our project archive and especially to the projects Green Economy - gendergerecht, FrauenUNTERNEHMEN Green Economy and Care, Gender & Green Economy