A Window of Opportunity for Feminist Claims? MPs’ Responsiveness to Gender Inequalities in French-Speaking Belgium During COVID-19

While a considerable number of studies have documented the way the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated gender inequalities, few studies have examined how elected representatives in democracies responded to these inequalities. Using discourse analysis in French-speaking Belgium (2019–2022), this article examines how elected representatives raised and framed the gendered effects of the pandemic. Three findings can be underlined. First, the pandemic constituted a window of opportunity for women MPs to raise gender concerns. Second, women MPs mostly politicized the consequences of successive lockdowns on multiple forms of violence against women. Third, the way women MPs framed gender issues in times of COVID-19 and their responses to them differed across ideological lines, with leftist MPs framing the problems and their solutions through more “feminist” lenses, by contrast to centre-right MPs using more “feminized” frames.