We were thrilled to attend, present, and serve as discussants and panel chairs at the ECPG this year! With over 700 participants from all over the world, this multidisciplinary conference was a fantastic venue to exchange ideas and share and discuss preliminary research findings.

The Push*Back*Lash team organized a joint panel with its sister project. The panel was joined by additional researchers and explored representations of gender+, gender equality, and intersectionality concepts in surveys across time and space. The panel featured five papers:

• Christina Pao (Princeton University) presented her findings on the alignment between free text and close-ended responses to gender and sexuality questions.
• Alba María Aragón Morales (Universidad Pablo de Olavide) discussed how gender equality and other societal factors are associated with short-term fertility intentions.
• Kristi Winters (GESIS) presented Push*Back*Lash findings from the assessment of survey questions that intended to measure feminist concepts. The team found that the four big European survey programs consistently measure only a minimal number of feminist concepts, focusing primarily on the measures of women's paid and unpaid labor.
• This finding was echoed by the findings from the research done by the UNTWIST team and presented by Louise Luxton (University of Manchester). The team explored which gender-based issues and needs were present and missing in cross-national and national surveys and the concepts they represent.
• Vera Beloshitzkaya (University of Salzburg) presented the results of the Push*Back*Lash teams' assessment of how intersectionality was measured in the four big surveys. The teams found very few examples of direct measures of intersectional inequalities.
• Nadine Zwiener-Collins (University of Salzburg), an expert on survey research, served as the panel's discussant.

Push*Back*Lash country teams presented research at several other panels of the conference:

• Rebekka Kesberg and Liza Mügge from the University of Amsterdam presented their paper "#ErasingWomen: The Use of Violent, Derogatory, and Dehumanizing Narratives in Promoting Anti-Gender Sentiments Online". A key finding from their research, which analyzed 20,000 tweets from 40 core actors opposing gender equality in eight European countries, is that these actors widely endorse dehumanizing narratives.
• Ana María Miranda Mora from the TU Dresden discussed anti-feminism and gender-based violence in Germany, focusing on the instrumentalization of women's rights discourses by right-wing political actors.
• Zsuzsanna Vidra and Enikő Virágh from ELTE presented their findings on discoursive tools and narratives politicians and decision-makers use in family policies in Hungary and the effect of these policies on Roma in general and Roma women in particular. 

The first Disability Studies in Eastern Europe: Reconfigurations Conference took place in Kraków, Poland, on May 16-18, 2024.

The conference featured 16 panels and 60 presentations by over 70 researchers from almost 20 countries. The conference opened with a panel discussion entitled "Imagined Futures and Politics of Disability Studies in Central Eastern Europe," to which the Push*Back*Lash's disability expert Dr. Magda Szarota was invited as one of the panelists. The researchers discussed the field of disability studies and highlighted the need for evidence-based advocacy in times of anti-feminist backlashes in Eastern Europe and beyond.  

Click here to listen to the full discussion.

We are happy to announce the publication of an open-access book chapter titled "Cognitive dissonance due to lived realities? The effects of the COVID-19 lockdown policy on Austria's gender role models" (in German). In this chapter, the University of Salzburg team, Lara Zwittlinger, Nadine Zwiener-Collins, and Zoe Lefkofridi, investigate the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown policy on gender role attitudes in Austria. 

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led many families to revert to the traditional division of labor, with women disproportionately affected by the closure of schools and childcare facilities. Although with the reopening of schools and kindergartens, most of the material inequalities have returned to pre-crisis levels, it remains unclear if changes in employment and care work patterns during the pandemic have also impacted gender role attitudes. In this chapter, we examine whether the pandemic experiences have brought about changes in gender role attitudes among the Austrian population. Using data from the Values-in-Crisis (VIC) study, we identified gender-specific dynamics related to changes in work-family configurations and analyzed how these changes have affected gender role attitudes. The results of our panel analyses show that the changes in attitudes were complex – but largely followed changes in lived realities. Women who reported taking on additional childcare responsibilities in the first wave of the survey tended to become more conservative in their gender role attitudes in the second wave. In contrast, the assumption of childcare responsibilities by men had the opposite effect, producing a shift towards more egalitarian attitudes.

Click here to read it.

Educational Cartoon #3:
Disability as Diversity

Policy Briefs