The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender
Equality adopted a report by Licia RONZULLI (EPP, IT) on
educational and occupational mobility of women in the
EU.
The Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, in
exercising its prerogatives as an associated committee in
accordance with Article 50 of Parliament’s Rules of
Procedure, was also consulted for an opinion on
this report.
The report begins by emphasising the need to
increase awareness of the situation of women of all age groups
in the context of the EU’s policies on education, social
integration, means to balance family and working life, migration
and employment, poverty, health care and in its social protection
policies.
Noting the fact that the right to live and work in
another country of the European Union is one of the
Union’s fundamental freedoms guaranteed to European Union
citizens by the Treaty on European Union, the report points out
that workers’ mobility and educational mobility help to deepen
people’s attachment to their European citizenship and,
at the same time, constitute a European principle for achieving
cohesion and solidarity across the EU.
The report calls on the Member States
to:
- include provisions to ensure transparency and
awareness in the area of women’s rights and the rights of
their family members in respect of mobility when designing their
national strategies and reform programmes;
- collect and analyse data on the difficulties, scale
and structure of women’s mobility, to draw attention to and
promote the benefits of employment mobility on their national
markets and the benefits of educational and employment mobility in
foreign countries;
- step up efforts and cooperation with special emphasis
on access to information and advice to combat the human
trafficking carried out by international networks that recruit
workers;
- work together to find solutions to prevent or
compensate for the effects that occupational mobility has on some
Member States in certain areas (such as the mobility of medical
personnel, who are predominantly women);
- ensure reciprocal recognition of diplomas and
professional qualifications and facilitate the simplification
of recognition procedures;
- make pay trends more transparent, so as to
avert continuing or widening pay gaps, including their implications
for the accumulation of pensions in the Member State of origin and
the host Member State;
- promote vocations and professions requiring scientific, technical, engineering and
mathematical skills among women from an early age, for better
employability and to assist the transition between education,
professional training and employment.
The Commission is invited to:
- monitor and report regularly on how EU funds focusing
on education and training, occupational and educational mobility
and on labour market participation are being taken up;
- find a means of integrating the education acquired
through youth mobility with jobs matching that education, in order
to increase the efficiency of the mobility process in both its
educational phase and its occupational phase;
- broaden and enhance the scope of projects designed to
increase the professional mobility of women;
- support the reallocation of adequate financial
resources to programmes that promote women’s employment and
better education for disadvantaged groups.
Members call on the Commission and on the Member
States to:
- improve the detection and elimination of the
violations of women’s rights in the labour market and
effectively punish these violations;
- take measures to prevent the feminisation of poverty
by promoting employment and the spirit of enterprise among
women;
- pay special attention to the problem of poverty among
older women caused by the fact that they receive smaller
pensions;
- develop policies, in cooperation with social partners
to eradicate the gender pay gap, that focus on the integration of
women in the labour market and promote equal opportunities for
mobility;
- combat gender stereotyping;
- implement swiftly the youth employment package with a
view to fostering early educational and occupational mobility of
young women.