Rural Resilience from a Gender Perspective

By adopting a critical perspective on the concept of rural resilience, this document (Deliverable D4.2 - GRANULAR project) aims to raise awareness of the normative values associated with it. Recognizing that nuanced understanding is essential for consistently applying the concept across Europe’s uneven and heterogeneous rural areas, we propose a working definition of rural resilience as contextual and spatially bound evolutionary process of future proofing that accounts for the interlinkages between the economic, environmental, and societal sustainability of the place, the community and the individual in a context of uncertainty and unpredictability. Adopting a systems’ perspective, rural resilience is operationalized through complex, non-linear processes. Furthermore, this definition frames resilience as a context-dependent notion in which time, space, and perceptions all play a crucial role in determining what is considered ’resilient’. Finally, the definition explicitly acknowledges that resilience within one domain can significantly impact other domains. Acknowledging these interdependencies, we aim to incorporate gender as an essential concept into our understanding of socio-demographic and socio-economic resilience in rural areas, and by extension, rural resilience. Our work focuses on uncovering the nature of gender and rurality gaps in employment outcomes across 27 European countries, providing insights into the intersection of gender, rurality, and welfare state typologies. Drawing on data from the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS) for 2013, 2018, and 2023, we investigate changes over time in labor markets' rurality and gender gaps, analyzing trends between 2013 and 2023. The work also explores cross-country variations by examining welfare typologies across Europe. The Rural Resilience from a Gender Perspective file consists of three main documents:- the Report presenting the analysis and findings on how the intersection of gender and degree of urbanisation shapes three labour market outcomes: employment status, prevalence of part-time work, and constraints in employment due to caregiving responsibilities- the associated Data and Indicators produced and their metadata- and a README document on Labor Market Outcomes Prediction Models, with three scripts for creating the data to assess gendered and rural–urban disparities in labor market attachment (employment, part-time employment and care responsibilities), using the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS).