Economic development and gender equality: Explaining variations in the gender poverty gap after socialism

Using the 2008 cross-sectional wave of the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and multilevel modeling techniques, this article explores the macro-level determinants of the gender-poverty gap in the ten post-socialist EU member states. In dialogue with the literature on the impact of economic development on gender inequality in Asia and Latin America, we find that fast-paced, foreign capital-led economic growth is associated with a larger gender-poverty gap in Central and Eastern Europe, while generous welfare policies, specifically higher levels of spending on pensions and family policies, are correlated with women's lower relative destitution. These findings evaluate the impact of neoliberal style "economic development" on gender inequality in a geopolitically specific context and suggest that structural adjustment and global market integration may exacerbate women's vulnerability even when they are well equipped with human capital and other resources to compete with men in the labor market.