Gender Equality is at stake in Europe

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 27/05/2021

The European Union lacks specific budget tools to ensure its spending promotes gender equality and should make more use of data broken down by sex to track and assess progress, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said.

Αuditors said in a report that the bloc’s executive European Commission has failed to include specific enough tools to promote gender equality through the EU’s joint budget worth some 1.1 trillion euros in 2021-27 and topped up with 750 billion in COVID-19 economic recovery spending.

The report comes a few weeks after member states Poland and Hungary blocked use of the phrase “gender equality” at an EU social summit in Porto.

“The Commission does not yet have a fully effective framework in place for supporting gender mainstreaming in the EU budget,” the report found. Auditors warned that data gaps and lack of gender analysis stall efforts to address the problem.

GENDER MAINSTREAMING NOT APLLIED ACROSS THE EU BUDGET

“Overall, gender mainstreaming has not yet been applied across the EU budget. The framework for supporting gender mainstreaming across the EU budget is not yet
fully in place. We found that the EU’s budget cycle did not adequately take gender equality into account,” auditors said, concluding that the Commission has not yet lived up to its commitment to gender mainstreaming in the EU budget.

More specifically, auditors found that the Commission’s gender-equality strategy did not sufficiently promote the use of gender mainstreaming. For the 2016-2019 period, the Commission replaced its previous gender-equality strategy with a non-binding document which did not include a plan for implementing and monitoring gender mainstreaming.

And even though the 2020-2025 Gender Equality Strategy states that the Commission will “enhance gender mainstreaming by systematically including a gender perspective in all stages of policy design in all EU policy areas, internal and external,” it does not include specific actions aimed at systematically taking gender equality into account in all EU policy areas, according to the report.

“Gender equality is at stake in Europe,” said Eva Lindstrom, a Swedish auditor with the EU oversight body, adding that a culture of “gender blindness” meant the bloc was not applying the perspective as it should to all spending.

The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) estimates GDP per capita in the EU would grow by 6-9.5% by 2050 if gender equality improved, with countries including Belgium, Poland, Italy, Portugal and Greece seen benefiting the most.

RECOMMENDATIONS

What does ECA recommends in the report?

• Strengthening the Commission’s institutional framework, by clarifying roles regarding gender mainstreaming in all policy areas and drawing up plans, coordinating and monitoring gender mainstreaming in the EU budget effectively, training all staff and ensuring that DGs share information and practices and make consistent use of available tools and expertise when implementing gender mainstreaming.
• Carrying out gender analysis of needs and impacts for EU funding programmes and instruments, and reporting on the results of these analyses.
• Collecting and analysing sex-disaggregated data, in order to provide a better basis for gender analyses.
• Using gender-related objectives and indicators, in order to better take into account the horizontal priority of gender equality across the EU
  budget, and to allow progress made to be monitored.
• Improving reporting on gender equality in order to enhance accountability and budgetary transparency, and to ensure that reliable information on funds allocated and used on gender equality at programme level in the MFF 2021-2027 is available.