On 9 June, the European Parliament adopted a report on the EU’s strategy for equality between women and men post 2015. The report calls for clearer targets, practical actions and more effective monitoring to improve gender equality in education, health, the labour market and in overall EU and national government programmes and policies.

ALDE Party Vice-President and shadow rapporteur of the report, Angelika Mlinar MEP stated: “I am proud to have contributed to a text that proposes clear actions on a wide range of issues, from combating stereotypes and the pension and pay gap, to the importance of universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, including contraception and safe & legal abortion.”

The report calls for further action in the following areas:

• Prevention and suppression of all forms of violence against women.
• Affordable childcare, flexible work time, adequate maternity, paternity and parental leave for both men and women in order to reconcile work and family life and to increase female employment rates.
• Equal representation of women and men in leadership positions.
• Gender pay gap.
• Safer and better sexual and reproductive health and rights through sex education programmes in school, high quality and readily accessible services and safe and legal abortion and contraception.
• Raising awareness of stereotypes, sexism and traditional roles in particular to combat bullying and prejudice against LGBTI persons through programmes in the education and media sector.
• Integrating a gender equality perspective in international humanitarian aid and asylum and migration policy.

The report also calls on the Commission to promote the use of gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting and gender impact assessment in all areas and for each legislative proposal at all levels of governance. Similarly, Member States should introduce the gender dimension in their budgets in order to analyse government programmes and policies, their impact on the allocation of resources and their contribution to equality between men and women.

The President of the ALDE Party Gender Equality Network, Flo Clucas, said: “I welcome this strategy towards gender equality in the EU especially the provision which states that equal treatment and gender equality should be prerequisites for public procurement contracts and the proposal to collect data on sexual harassment, the lack of collected data has prevented real comparison of Member State action. Stigmatisation on the grounds of gender has also prevented women from achieving their potential in the workplace. The actions proposed in this report are timely and would lead to significant change. ALDE GEN hopes that the role of women’s enterprise would also be improved by the proposed measures as the fight against poverty is an economic as well as a political one.”

“Year by year the European Parliament discusses gender equality. It is finally time that words are followed by actions”, said Gesine Meissner MEP and ALDE GEN Vice-President.