Meeting of PERC Women’s Committee

On 19th and 20th of February 2019 in Brussels gathered PERC Women’s Committee. The main issues on the agenda were: the report of activities for 2018 presented by Sabine Slegers, the president of the PERC Women’s Committee, main challenges and priorities in the PERC region presented by Anton Leppik, Executive Secretary of PERC, raising awareness on major European policies and legal instruments for action in the field, to meet today’s challenge of a lowered status of gender equality in Europe, ETUC campaign presented by Montserrat Mir, Confederal Secretary of ETUC; discussion on gender pay gap and social protection gaps with presentations from ITUC experts Evelyn Astor and Luca Cigna, discussion and adoption of the PERC Women’s’ Committee Work plan for 2019, discussion about ITUC congress resolutions and how to implement the decisions of the 4th World Congress in the region.

The presentations made by committee members showed that precariousness and job insecurity are expanding gender inequalities in the society as a whole: women are still paid less than men; the gender pay gap has not narrowed in recent years; despite of high level of education decision making positions at political and economic level are predominantly held by men; glass ceilings that stop women rising up the work hierarchy; glass walls that segregate women into particular jobs; women are not enough represented in decision making positions in trade unions; persistence of domestic violence and violence at workplace.

Despite the increased challenges and difficulties that women’s structures face in their work in many PERC region’s organizations, a great number of activities, capacity building actions, campaigns have been organized: the Count Us In! Campaign was signed by majority of organizations in the region; recently good progress has been made with increasing the number of women in top leadership positions - 30.3 percent of elected top-leadership positions are women; labor reforms as part of the Count Us In! campaign took place in Moldova and Georgia; social protection and child care benefits were discussed in most organizations; pensions reforms in Moldova and Georgia; informal economy in Central Asian countries; awareness and capacity building programs for women and men on gender equality have been developed in Moldova, FNPR Russia, KTR Russia, GTUC Georgia with an accent on organizing young women and care economy.

The PERC women’s committee adopted the Work plan for 2019 and decided to continue its work on fighting gender based violence at the workplace, to lobby the governments for an ILO Convention supplemented by a Recommendation on Gender based Violence; to start campaigning against gender pay gap and pension gap on national levels, to continue organizing more women in unions with special attention to young women workers; to campaign for promoting more women in leadership positions and make women’s voice heard in the unions.

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Gender wage gap
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