The European Parliament adopted a resolution on
educational and occupational mobility of women in the
EU.
The resolution emphasises 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.
In highlighting the fact that educational and
occupational mobility has been recognised as offering added value
to the EU, Parliament stresses that the economic crisis is making
it increasingly necessary to adapt one’s choice of
occupation to what is available on the labour market, and that
it is increasingly vital for women to be more adaptable to the
demands of new career opportunities when changing
occupations.
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 resolution 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.
Parliament 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;
- monitor the situation of workers who care for children
and other dependants and provide enough information to women moving
abroad to take on such jobs, including information on access to
declared work and training in the relevant area, on
social rights, on healthcare, etc.;
- 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.
Parliament also encourages the Member States to
facilitate procedures for local and regional authorities to,
among other things: (i) design and put into practice specific
programmes to integrate women and men into local communities and to
foster intercultural exchange; (ii) address highly mobile women at
risk; and (iii) support social awareness campaigns by non-profit
organisations focusing on women in international
communities.
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.
Parliament calls 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.