New CESI positions on women’s rights: Glass ceilings in the public sector, violence against women, gender aspects in the EU Care Strategy

At its meeting on June 21, CESI’s statutory Commission on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality adopted a series of new position papers, focusing on violence against women, glass ceilings in the public sector in Europe and gender aspects in a new EU Care Strategy.

The resolution on ‘Breaking glass ceilings in the public and private sector‘ calls for further EU and national level measures, together with social partners and trade unions, to flank and complement gender quotas in public services and public administrations to achieve more effective equal opportunities and career prospects for women in public services and public administrations at the local, regional, national and EU levels. The full resolution is available here.

The resolution on the European Commission’s legislative proposal for a binding new EU directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence, published on March 8 2022, lays out CESI’s trade union priorities to further strengthen the proposal during the negotiation and adoption phase in the European Parliament and the Council. It calls in particular for a more structured and systematic involvement of all social partners and trade unions in the implementation of the directive, which also spans to violence against women in occupational life. The full resolution is available here. It is accompanied by a joint letter to the incoming Czech Council Presidency, calling on it to advance negotiations on the accession of the EU to the Istanbul Convention on violence against women.

The position paper on gender aspects in a new EU Care Strategy makes the case for a strong gender dimension in any new EU strategy, given that 90% of the formal care workforce is female and just 10% male – while working conditions in the sector tend to be relatively difficult and wages low. In calls for a series of measures to improve framework conditions in the sector, which would most notably benefit women. Concretely, the positions argues in favour of better working conditions and higher pay in the care sector, a strengthened provision of affordable, accessible and high-quality early childhood education and care and long-term care services as well as a further promoted more equal sharing of domestic care responsibilities between partners, ways to ensure that responsibilities to provide care for children or relatives can be reconciled by flexible work arrangements and working hours for affected workers, and further improvements for personal household care services and in particular unregulated informal household care. The full position paper is available here.