Česká ženská lobby 

European Women’s Lobby: Women, the Financial and Economic Crisis - the Urgency of a Gender Perspective

The European Women’s Lobby (EWL), the largest coalition of women’s organisations in the European Union (EU), urges policy makers at all levels of decision making to recognize women’s role in shaping the post crisis framework which, one year after the collapse of the financial markets, continues to ignore the gender impact of the crisis on the real lives of women and men. Both the gender impact of the crisis and the necessity of the inclusion of the gendered aspects to the recovery plans and solution process must be recognized at European, international as well as national level. The EWL emphasizes that the current crisis has a much higher, albeit differentiated, impact on women, not only from EU but also from other regions of the world. While women are integrated into the work-place, economic position of women at the start of the recession was by no means equal to that of men due to employment patterns as gender segregated labour-markets, gender gaps in pay, higher levels of part-time work and high concentration in the so called informal sector with lower earnings and less social protection. There are the multi-layered dimensions of the impact of the financial crisis on women: economical, social, governance, banking and ideological. Throughout the economy, the gender dimension of the crisis is easily overlooked. Official unemployment predictions for example give similar figures for women and for men bit fail to take into account the over-representation of women in part-time work, an area which is excluded from unemployment statistics. Furthermore, surveys show that women are more likely to be fired as, when jobs are scarce, men are seen to be the legitimate breadwinners. Men are also more likely than women to be in an advantageous position in relation to savings and income. The average gender pay gap in the EU is currently at 17.4% – to the disadvantage of women. The greatest risk in the current crisis is widening the gap between women and men. Presently women represent a majority of those living in poverty: between 85% and 90% of single-parent households are headed by a woman.

Therefore the European Women’s Lobby calls for political recognition that accelerating the process of gender equality is vital for sustainable solutions to the crisis; systematic gender-sensitive analysis of the impact of the crisis; investment in social infrastructure, particularly in education, health, child and dependent persons care in order to ease the disproportionate burden on women to enable them to participate in all areas of life; revision of the outmoded assumption that men are the ‘family breadwinners’, which determines labour-market participation and social protection related benefits, in particular pension schemes; the enhancement and normalisation of employment patterns that are based on women’s experience on the labour-market (flexible work, job sharing and other part-time arrangements); commitment to a more equal division of caring responsibilities and domestic labour between men and women to help women stem their double burden of family and work; the guarantee of a State Pension System, particularly as women’s pension levels result in the feminisation of poverty as they age; the guarantee of the individualisation of social security and taxation rights in order to break women’s dependency on their partners and/or the State; work towards parity democracy, in political and economic decision-making, private companies and in the financial sector so as to harness women’s economic potential and ensure the diversity and balance among decision-makers which engenders better governance.
 

Česká ženská lobby je finančně podpořena nadacemi OSF Praha
a Slovak-Czech Women's Fund v rámci projektu
"Prosazování genderové rovnosti v období CZ PRESS"