In the economic literature, several scholars have addressed the narrative of a two-stage European crisis. In a first stage, the so-called “he-cession”, men would have been hit the most by the economic recession induced by the financial crisis. Shortly thereafter, in the “she-austerity” stage, women would have suffered the heaviest burdens of the fiscal retrenchment measures. If that were the case, the policy response to the crisis would be producing an increase in the – already high pre-existing – gender inequality.
In this work we analyse the most recent micro-data available at the European level, the European Union
Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), containing information on European households’ incomes
in the time span 2008 - 2015. As it turns out, the crisis and the policy response to it have impoverished several
European households and increased income inequality in Europe, also in a gender dimension.
