Experts call on EU to ‘fully integrate’ gender approach in bloc’s budget and policy

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Despite the progress achieved at the EU level on gender equality, policies and budgetary decisions have yet to fully include a gender perspective, according to experts and MEPs.

The unequal distribution of wealth, income and labour between men and women in Europe has created a “huge structural imbalance, which impairs women’s equality,” according to Green MEP Alexandra Geese.

To address this imbalance, Geese has been pushing for a gender budgeting approach at the EU level, to ensure EU policies and funds include a gender perspective assessing their impact on both women and men.

However, “we are still not there,” said Elisabeth Klatzer, gender budgeting expert, despite there being “enough knowledge, enough understanding and methods readily available for the Commission to use it in the implementation of the budget and other funds.”

Gender budgeting at EU level

Gender budgeting has been discussed at the EU level for several years, but “is far from being fully integrated” into the EU budget, according to Klatzer.

“Unfortunately, financing gender equality when you’re dealing with the EU budget has lost focus,” she said, adding that mainstreaming gender equality across all policy areas has meant losing ground on specific funds tackling inequality.

“I think it has to do with a loss of the political will to really dedicate resources to gender equality and loss of political focus on gender equality over the years now,” she said.

According to the Commission, gender equality has been included in the 2021-2027 budget “as a horizontal principle as well as through specific programme objectives or dedicated actions […], with a view to promoting gender-focused and gender-responsive policies.”

Moreover, the EU executive is now experimenting with a gender approach in the draft 2023 budget.

“The Commission has applied for the first time on a pilot basis a novel methodology to track the contributions of EU spending programmes to advancing gender equality,” a Commission spokesperson told EURACTIV.

However, Klatzer said overall the EU budget remains “skewed towards the influence of big multinationals and economic interests and shielding off democratic social interests.”

In her view, budgetary decisions and economic policies remain bureaucratic, preventing the inputs and participation from the broader society.

Moreover, there is a lack of data to clearly understand the impact of EU policies and budgetary decisions on gender equality.

To address this issue, the Commission is now working on data collection “to later allow an assessment of the effects EU financing has had on gender equality,” according to a spokesperson.

“When we get those numbers I’m sure we’ll see that at least 80% of the budget goes to men. 80% is my best guess,” Geese said.

Gender budgeting at the local level

While the EU is slowly progressing on gender budgeting, member states are still behind, with only five countries having applied gender budgeting in 2019, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).

However, gender budgeting is becoming more common at the local level.

In Vienna, a gender budgeting approach has been adopted since 2005, to check who benefits from the local financial resources and whether their distribution contributes to decreasing gender inequality.

At the district level, for instance, the municipality noticed that women and men use transport differently and decided to invest a part of the city budget in a street redevelopment.

“If we look at transport from a gender perspective, we might have a lot more public transport, because women drive less than men,” Geese told EURACTIV, calling for more women to sit at the table and shape policy decisions.

“If you ask the whole population – and you have 50% women among the people you talk to – ‘How do you want to see your city transport?’, you get different results.”

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

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