00:00:01 Intro
00:00:32 Mary McCaughey
Welcome to this edition of Eurofound Talks. Today we'll be focusing on women and particularly on gender equality. We're going to explore the gaps and inequalities that persist in employment, in pay, in care responsibilities and we'll look at what's being done to address these issues. Particularly we're going to look at it post-COVID, as we move towards a greener, more digital Europe. What has worked, what hasn't and what can we do about it?
To talk about this today, on the eve of International Women's Day, I am delighted to welcome Carlien Scheele, Director of the EU Agency for Gender Equality (EIGE), which is based in Vilnius, and Maria Jepsen, who is the Deputy Director here at Eurofound. You're both very welcome. So to begin with, let's just focus on International Women's Day. The eighth of March is a day which is supposed to serve to highlight the persisting inequalities that women face in their daily lives and their working situations. The focus this year is on what they're calling #BreakTheBias. Both our agencies have been involved in some element of work around these areas of discrimination, stereotypes and breaking that bias. Carlien, can you begin and tell us what it means for you? What is EIGE doing to break down the bias?
00:01:53 Carlien Scheele
Yes, I must say it's great to talk with you about gender equality on the occasion of International Women's Day, although I would say that our conversation on gender equality should continue any other day, be it before or after the eighth of March: it's a very important topic. Specifically focusing on biases and stereotyping, what EIGE does is really relevant for policymakers. We provide data and information that is relevant on many topics, but also stereotyping. We provide evidence to policymakers. For example, one interesting thing we found through our research when it comes to stereotyping is that, in the workplace, evaluators more frequently describe men using task-oriented adjectives, such as 'analytical' and 'competent', and women were described using relationship-focused adjectives such as 'compassionate' and 'enthusiastic'. What we find important is to provide evidence and information to those who design policies so that they know what is taking place, for example in the workplace. I also want to stress that the stereotyping is something that we all do, consciously, most often I think unconsciously. It's our task to make this visible to those who need data and information.
00:03:23 Mary McCaughey
Thanks Carlien. That's certainly an opening statement. We'll talk a little bit more about that sort of soft skills stereotyping later in the conversation, I hope. Maria, Eurofound has also done an awful lot of work, certainly in recent times but not only, on highlighting the inequalities which are facing women in the workplace and in society. Can you give us an idea of what you think are the top priorities that we have delivered during this last couple of years?
00:03:50 Maria Jepsen
During the last couple of years, we have looked very much into the outcomes of what Carlien was just talking about, namely stereotyping and bias, on structural issues such as the gender pay gap and gender employment gap, which are long-standing issues we find in the labour market. But we have also looked very much into the impact of the pandemic in terms of the working lives of women and men, in terms of what the impact has been on their mental health, on their outlook on the future and in terms of work-life balance. Here we have been able to highlight the multidimensional and negative impact of the pandemic on women.
00:04:31 Mary McCaughey
There is a kind of bitter irony here when we're talking about celebrating International Women's Day because we know that COVID-19 has hit women very hard across so many areas. We've seen that low-paid female workers in the services sectors were hit most by job losses. We've also seen that an increase in teleworking has also exacerbated the work-life conflict issues, particularly for mothers of small children, and we've seen particularly an increase in gender-based violence. In a way, there doesn't seem to be much to celebrate here. Are we looking at a rollback on gender equality, Carlien, that we will not be able to address?
00:05:13 Carlien Scheele
Yes, as Maria said, the pandemic will have a very negative impact on gender equality. To mention some facts that we found through our research in the past period. Before the pandemic, we at EIGE estimated that it would take another 60 years for the European Union to achieve gender equality, and this was before the pandemic. With all good intentions, I think, Member States and of course governments asked people to stay at home and we were confined. What we see now is that sometimes home can be the worst place for people. You already mentioned the high spikes of domestic violence. Women were locked up with their perpetrators and could go nowhere and didn't know how to ask for help. What we see is that women still do significantly more childcare and housework than men. Even though fathers cared more for children and did more homework during the pandemic, women still take the biggest share of that combination of work and private life. So they combined work, home schooling, they cared for other dependents, etc.
What is quite worrying is that, although both women and men lost their jobs during the pandemic, it's much more difficult for women to get back on the labour market, also because they have these care duties. What is most worrying, I think, is that the younger generations of women, because they have these care duties, are no longer available for the labour market. That will have an impact in the future. Of course, if you don't have a job, you might be financially dependent on someone else and that doesn't help gender equality. Hopefully, through the reform process in the European Union, Member States will take this information seriously and focus on gender equality in the reform process.
00:07:14 Mary McCaughey
Maria, when you hear Carlien, she perhaps has a slight optimistic tone to her voice that we will be able to recover from what has happened over the last period. But are the inequalities that we saw, for example, in our survey ‘Living, working and COVID-19’, are they repairable? Will we be able to recover in terms of gender equality progress?
00:07:45 Maria Jepsen
As Carlien said, we'll recover but in the long term, not in the short term. I also think that the pandemic has highlighted the gender inequalities that were already present, but perhaps exacerbated during the pandemic and have given rise to a larger awareness of, for example, working conditions and pay conditions for a lot of the low-paid women that were frontline or essential workers. That gender violence has become unacceptable. We're seeing a lot of initiatives getting to terms with the fact that gender violence is unacceptable, a movement we didn't see some years ago. As Carlien perhaps thinks, the dire statistics that we've seen from the pandemic will make policymakers gender mainstream a little bit more than they did before because the statistics were so sharp in displaying and highlighting the gender inequalities that we have in terms of care, in terms of work and in terms of pay. In that sense, I think we can go either way. Either we move on from where we are now and we take the lessons learned and we try to do better, which I hope is what will happen, or we don't learn from the lessons, in which case I would agree that the perspectives are not very positive.
00:08:53 Mary McCaughey
We know that the Gender Equality Strategy, which has been in place since 2020 and runs until 2025 at least, aims to address some of these core issues that you raised Carlien: pay transparency, gender pay gap, gender balance on company boards, work-life balance, etc. These are very worthy ideals and goals, but is this the real priority do you think? Is this what is going to address the fundamentals of inequality?
00:09:20 Carlien Scheele
Like Maria, I also see very positive developments, and you mentioned the Gender Equality Strategy of the European Commission. I think it's actually giving a really good push to gender equality in the European Union because what is a very important element of that strategy is gender mainstreaming. So the Commission calls upon Member States to take gender into account in all the portfolios, and what we see at EIGE – and it's really a positive development – is that we get more and more requests from Member States, but also from the Commission to support them in gender mainstreaming. We have the tools, we have the knowledge, they ask for our assistance.
To touch upon another element that I find really relevant and that we have also made visible through some of our reports is the huge economic benefits of gender equality. That's something that that we tend to forget sometimes. Of course, we talk about women’s rights, we talk about gender equality, but let's not forget that there is also a huge economic benefit when we take gender equality into account. Specifically, we did a study on the economic benefits of gender equality, and this study showed that more gender equality can boost economic growth and job creation. Isn't that what we are aiming at in the European Union? We estimate that it could create up to 10.5 million additional jobs by 2050 and push the EU employment rate up to 80%. That's great data, great information that I hope the Member States will see and will also seriously take into account when going through this reform process. Gender equality can boost the economy.
00:11:07 Mary McCaughey
So gender equality is good for us, good for society and good for the economy. So Maria, on the employment gap and the pay gap, Eurofound has done a wide range of research work in these areas. We also know that female employment has been growing faster than male employment in the highest paying jobs, which are those that are accounting for the top 20% of employment by average wage. Do you think we're actually looking at even more inequalities, Maria, in the labour market in the future? There are more women at work and there will be more women at work, but they're in the high-paid jobs. Are they leaving the minimum wage, low-paid precarious sisterhood behind?
00:11:50 Maria Jepsen
I think this is a trend for women as well as for men. This is a general trend in the labour market that we are going towards more polarisation, which needs to be taken seriously in terms of policy measures to counter some of the negative effects that can result from this. I still would say that the majority of women actually work in jobs that are found in the lower income brackets in the labour market. That's where we find the majority of women. It is true that the growth in the higher-paid jobs is faster for women than for men, but they're coming from a very low level. So they still have a lot of catching up to do in this. So the polarisation yes, but we still need to make sure that we keep an eye on the working conditions and pay conditions of women in the lower deciles of the labour market.
Eurofound has long-standing and wide-ranging work looking at the structural gender inequalities. We have the European Jobs Monitor, which we use extensively to identify the structural changes in the labour market where we see that women’s employment has grown faster in the higher-paying jobs than for men, but the women are still concentrated more in the lower-paid jobs.
We also use our European Working Conditions Survey to monitor very closely the job quality both for women and for men. We identified that the job quality dimensions are very different for men and for women. We have over the past years made research work with regard to the gender employment gap, where we identify that the gender employment gap is stagnating at around 12% and this is actually costing the European Union something like EUR 320 billion annually.
Another piece of research or strand of research where we highlight the gender inequalities is with regard to the minimum wage. Currently we publish an annual minimum wage report where we identify who are the minimum wage earners. Here we see that 60% of minimum wage earners are women, but women actually represent less than 50% of the labour market, meaning that women are disproportionately found in the wage brackets around the minimum wage, meaning very low wages. Nearly 9% of women earn around the minimum wage compared to only 5% for men. Moving forward, we have a big pilot project on minimum wage where we will look into the collectively agreed minimum wages. Here again, we're concentrating on sectors where there is a high concentration of female workers, and again the gender dimension comes out very strongly in terms of how collective agreements can actually ensure an adequate minimum wage.
Eurofound is also setting up a project on multidimensional gender inequalities. We've spoken a lot about gender inequalities in the labour market here, but gender inequalities are also very persistent in the living conditions. This research will try to combine the inequalities that we observe within the labour market with the gender inequality that we also observe in living conditions. This in particular affects single mothers, where energy poverty is clearly an issue.
00:15:13 Mary McCaughey
I wanted to talk about the gender pay gap because it is the widest in the highest quintile. But I'm also wondering what does that say, reverting back to what Carlien said earlier, what is it about women, perhaps? Why are we not in a position to be able to bargain for better wages when that wage gap remains so persistent?
00:15:40 Maria Jepsen
I think this goes back to what Carlien said earlier in terms of bias and stereotyping in the workplace. We know that there is a glass ceiling, so women don't go all the way up on the career ladder. They tend to be fewer going all the way up in the career ladder. On top of that, return to education is lower for women, especially in the higher-paid jobs, which means that even though we've seen more women getting higher-level education these days, they don't seem to reap the benefits in terms of the higher pay that should come along with this. That is basically down to the very segregated labour markets that we have in terms of sectors and in terms of occupations and in terms of tasks, as Carlien was evoking. Those are some of the issues that we need to get to terms with in the labour market. It’s not because you do a care job that you should be less paid than doing another kind of task. We need to go back to giving the right value to the right job. That's a long road to go down, but that's where we need to head.
00:16:48 Mary McCaughey
So it's about sectors, it's about structure, but it's also about stereotypes. It is about that internalised bias that we all have, which accepts and agrees with a system that still has a 14.1% gender pay gap across the European Union.
Carlien, pay and employment are clearly very much to the fore of women’s everyday lives, but it feels like still today, when we talk about women’s equality, the default position is to revert to talk about childcare, talk about work-life balance, as if that is the unique sort of situation where we place women when we discuss equality. Is that not a very normative approach to gender equality in this day and age? Are we not beyond this?
00:17:29 Carlien Scheele
It is true that the risk is that we see this as a responsibility of women and that women should change and that women should take a different approach. But we are talking about gender equality, which is equality between women and men. But for this discussion, it's still very important that we provide policymakers and other stakeholders with the relevant data and information so that we know which buttons to push, what to change. Talking about this specific topic of work-life balance and how we can make the situation more equal for women and men, it's important that we know what data we are talking about. Of course, work-life balance conflicts have increased for many parents, both women and men. They all tried to cope with mental stress and burnout during the pandemic. This was especially the case for mothers of young children trying to combine telework, supervision of online classes and childcare.
Looking at some data, our research shows that across the EU, more than half of women of childbearing age who are not in paid work say that the main reason they cannot look for a job is because of family responsibilities. This is really an alarming figure: 53%. When it comes to men the figure is 8%. To mention a few other data or things we found through our research, women have been doing about 36 hours of unpaid care work a week. That's almost 2,000 hours a year, which to put it into context is more or less what you give to a full-time job. The value of unpaid care work has been estimated to be around EUR 9 trillion each year globally. When you hear these figures, the only thing I hope is that policymakers, who are hopefully designing the best policies possible, take these figures into account. It's not only the data about women but both data about men and women and knowing which buttons to push when it concerns policymaking.
00:19:42 Mary McCaughey
As you said earlier, it makes economic sense and people should be motivated by a sort of self-interest, if nothing else, in terms of moving this forward. Of course, gender is not necessarily restricted to the very binary definition of men and women. When we talk about women and men's equality, we have been talking about that in the past but clearly the scope is much broader, and Carlien I know that in EIGE you've expanded the work to include this to a large degree over recent times. What has that meant to the ongoing debate?
00:20:37 Carlien Scheele
Well, let's say the broader approach has always been the scope of EIGE’s work. If you look at EIGE’s mandate, we focus on men and women in all their diversity. ‘United in diversity’ has been the motto of the European Union since the new millennium. That's important to take into account. When you look at how EIGE collects data, for example, if you look at the Gender Equality Index, we strive to reflect this diversity. So we take an intersectional approach, as it is called. Where data are available, we try to also include characteristics like age, ability, disability, migrant background, ethnicity, sexual orientation or socioeconomic background. Where we can find the data, we include them. Of course, we cannot always find them, which is sometimes a little bit annoying. We also try to find other information through our own surveys. If you do a solid gender analysis, which is always the first step of gender mainstreaming, you have to understand how the situation of men and women is in a particular area. If you do it well, you certainly touch upon these other characteristics. So this is a very important instrument. You can only develop the best policies if you understand what the data are telling you. We also work closely together with another sister agency, the Fundamental Rights Agency, who also focus on a broad range of characteristics, and we continue the good work.
00:22:00 Mary McCaughey
Looking at what we've discussed so far, Maria, we've looked at the impact of COVID, but of course in parallel we have the transition to the green economy and the digital. Do you think that we are likely to see the transition to green and digital actually offset some of the inequalities that we've seen in the system or do you think it's possible that we are going to see an exacerbation as a result of this?
00:22:29 Maria Jepsen
Once again, it can go either way. As we go towards the twin digital and green transition, new jobs will be created and old jobs will be disrupted. I think it's also important to realise that, while we are transiting, some of the bigger sectors where women work, like public services, education and health, are also very much growing sectors. So we need to ensure that the underlying problems we already have in these sectors are addressed and that we don't only address the new challenges that we will face in terms of the transition, which will be that we will get more jobs in sectors that are male-dominated like construction, like STEM and so forth, where we need to have a very specific pause to make sure that women actually can engage into these occupations. At the same time, we need to make sure that some of the underlying problems we already have in the existing sectors that will continue to grow are addressed.
00:23:32 Mary McCaughey
Have we seen recently in research findings the impact of this on women’s lives specifically in these areas?
00:23:44 Carlien Scheele
The digitalisation that you mentioned is an important and growing topic. We did a study for the Slovenian Presidency of the European Union and we looked into platform work such as ride hailing, food delivery and into the impact of artificial intelligence and we see it's transforming our economies. We also found what it means for gender equality. A few details from that study: platform work is growing and artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming part of our day-to-day lives. We know that already 10% of the EU population has done work via platforms such as Uber. We interviewed some 5,000 of these workers and we found that there are mainly young, highly educated and taking care of children, in particular if they are women. More than a third of women doing platform work told us they do this because they can combine these jobs with their private life. But many work at night, the weekends and hours they cannot choose, so it combines both positive elements for the workers but also negative elements. What I sincerely hope is that EU Member States will welcome the European Commission’s new proposal for legislation to improve the working conditions of platform workers, and this will certainly benefit women.
00:24:56 Mary McCaughey
Looking at the move to climate change and particularly in the context of the Green Deal, do you think there are specific gender-targeted policies that are required to make these transitions equitable and fair for women and gender equality more generally?
00:25:14 Carlien Scheele
This is really an interesting topic because if we don't watch out, we could take a completely gender-neutral approach. I don't think that many people realise that, specifically in this topic, gender is such an important element. From research we did in the past, we know, but we don't have enough information yet, that climate change is having a different impact on women and men. Also, women and men impact the climate differently. To be more concrete, the ones most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change tend to be women. For example, energy poverty is disproportionately affecting single women. With all the good intentions of the Green Deal, many of these measures are also on the household level. One can imagine that, for example, for single women, it's impossible to pay for such measures if they have a small job. That's something we should take into account.
We also know from our research that women show more concern for the climate than men, which means that we have to make the impact on women and men more visible for all citizens. Another thing I would like to mention here is that the decision makers, the ministers and other decision makers at work on green topics are mostly men, and that can't be true. We have 50% of women and 50% of men roughly in a population, so it's important that women’s voices are also heard in this portfolio.
00:26:52 Mary McCaughey
So the representation of women in the decision making and the policy process. Maria, Eurofound has also been working in this area. Do you want to give an indication of how we can see the socioeconomic implications of the transition towards climate change impacting women?
00:27:11 Maria Jepsen
What Carlien said in terms of the gendered impact of both the climate change and of the mitigation policies comes out very strongly in the research that we've conducted, because we know that climate change impacts different income groups in different ways. It's lower income groups that are more hardly hit and we have a higher proportion of women in the lower income brackets. In that sense, it's very important to put these gendered glasses on because it's not only about income, it's also about gender.
Secondly, on the mitigation policies that have been put into place in terms of retrofitting, in terms of grants to move towards electrified transport, we have in our research identified that the lower income households cannot benefit from this either because they are not household owners or because they cannot make the capital investment that is needed. But then at the same time, they are the ones that are most susceptible to have energy poverty. In these income brackets we have a majority of women, so they are harder hit in terms of the lack of policies targeted towards lower income brackets as well as being impacted by climate change. So we could risk having a compounding of energy poverty, what we call transport poverty, making situations even more difficult in the future. I think that agencies like Eurofound and EIGE can highlight these issues and the data behind it, and make policymakers aware that these are areas that you need to take closer look into and be very well aware when we're transiting that would make a transition that is socially fair.
00:28:59 Mary McCaughey
Getting to a more human, personal approach to this, it's important that we don't see this always in terms of theory, in terms of research, in terms of technical policy approach. Sometimes it's interesting to try and see how this actually impacts on people's lives. Both of you have, at this stage, climbed the ladder and you now occupy high-ranking positions in the world of work. If you were to talk to the incoming generation, daughters or indeed your sons, what are the takeaways of those experiences, Maria?
00:29:42 Maria Jepsen
The takeaway of those experiences is that all citizens should push their governments to put in place the right policies to ensure that there is gender equality, meaning adequate and affordable care structures, the right to paternity and maternity leave, and engaging with workplaces that actually promote gender equality, both for men and for women. In terms of job quality, for example, the levels might be more or less the same for men and women, but the components of job quality for men and women are not the same. Women have a higher job quality when it comes to work-life balance. That has to do with the fact that companies might expect women to engage more with measures that promote work-life balance, whereas men are not expected to do this. What we need are workplaces to live up to the fact that this is an issue for men and women. Like Carlien was saying before, there is a responsibility for men to engage with this.
I would also say that talking about work-life balance as we talk a lot is not always true. Work-life balance is maybe not always a balance. Sometimes you need to put your focus on the work and sometimes you need to put your focus on life and society and companies need to realise that this is what real life is about for men and for women as well.
00:31:16 Mary McCaughey
Do you think, Maria, that for your daughters, the world of work and the society that they live in
is a better one in terms of gender equality than the one you experienced?
00:31:22 Maria Jepsen
That's a very difficult question to answer. It's how we move forward from now on. I've been very lucky in terms of the countries I've lived in, Denmark and Belgium, when I had small children, because there was a lot of care services, because there was legislation in place that enabled me to actually combine work and life; despite the fact, there was not always a balance. I also had very good workplaces that actually enabled me to focus on different parts of this during my career. Will my daughters have the same opportunity? I sincerely hope so. And I do think that the focus that we have today in terms of saying that gender inequality is unacceptable and we need to do something about it in terms of gender violence, which is a fundamental flaw in our societies, with regard to how workplaces engage with women and with men in terms of their careers and the fact that they actually have a life outside of work. Can we move this one forward? Then yes, they will be in a better place than I was. But I feel that I have been in a very lucky place.
00:32:25 Mary McCaughey
Carlien, what would be your own personal feeling on this?
00:32:29 Carlien Scheele
I have three takeaways that I would like to share. If you want something, be vocal about it. Even if you think that your boss might see your qualities and competencies, if you don't speak up, you might stay invisible. So it's important to speak up if you want something, if you want a promotion, if you want to apply for a certain job, if you want to do training, just say it, don't stay silent; that's the first one.
The second is also something that Maria mentioned on the combination of work and private life. I have been a single mother for several years and I had a very busy job. I also made clear to my colleagues, not in a complaining mode, but I just showed them my reality. It meant that I couldn't work on weekends or in the evenings. I was vocal about this, without complaining, but just showing my situation.
Thirdly, and this is something I said to my daughter and my two sons, it's important to be financially independent because if you're financially independent, you can do whatever you want. You might end up in situations where it's great to be financially independent. And I'm very proud to see that my daughter is very vocal and she has a great job, and the same for my elder son. The youngest is still in university, but I'm sure he will follow the same path.
00:34:00 Mary McCaughey
I think that's very interesting because we started on International Women’s Day and both of you have referred to the need for women and the younger generation to maintain their level of assertiveness, I suppose is the word I would like to use without stereotyping, and to become and remain vocal about their rights and their needs. We've looked at what Eurofound and EIGE have done and you've indicated to me to a large degree your issues. What would you say to policymakers if there were three key challenges that they needed to address to progress the gender equality issue into the next generation? Is there something that you would like to add to that? Talk to me in three, Maria.
00:34:50 Maria Jepsen
What is important, as Carlien mentioned, is to make sure that the change in terms of gender equality is not the responsibility only of women. The change we see today is a responsibility of men and women. Men have a very strong role to play in terms of breaking the stereotypes, breaking the bias and also taking up some of the unpaid care work. That would be something that would be important for policymakers to onboard when we talk about gender mainstreaming and moving policies forward.
The second is that it's important to make sure that the Work-life Balance Directive is appropriately implemented and carried out to live up to the expectations in terms of providing work-life balance for men and for women. Then we need to push on and upgrade transparency. I'm an economist, I believe that you act on what you see. If we have figures on pay inequalities in your workplace and you see them very apparent, you will start acting on them and they will become unsustainable because they will create an unfair workplace. So for me, this is a very important element to push forward on.
00:36:03 Mary McCaughey
Thank you, Maria. Carlien, your elevator pitch to policymakers in three?
00:36:10 Carlien Scheele
I would focus on the following areas: the field of care is really important because there's a big imbalance between how women and men are involved.
The second portfolio I would like to mention here is gender-based violence. We mentioned it before, we saw high spikes of gender-based violence, but I think that the focus should be on new or specific forms of violence, such as cyber violence, intimate partner violence. For these new or more unknown types of violence, we need to collect more data and work on definitions that can be used EU wide.
The third point I would like to mention, specifically because it's a worrying trend that we have been seeing for a long time and it's getting more and more important, is anti-gender initiatives that we see in the European Union. There are movements that speak against gender equality. We have to understand where this comes from, how they are organised. This is what we are currently looking into at the European Institute for Gender Equality.
So I would suggest care, gender-based violence and anti-gender initiatives as the main policy areas where we can make progress.
00:37:17 Mary McCaughey
Thank you Carlien and thank you Maria. What is clear is that this is a shared responsibility, as well as the desire to ensure that this is shared not only between women and men, but across society at large. There are challenges, there are policies in place and they will grow and develop. We've covered a lot of issues today focusing on care, work-life balance, pay, gender-based violence as you referred to earlier, employment and much more. It is a conversation, as you said Carlien, that continues and we hope this will go well beyond International Women’s Day on 8 March.
Thank you Carlien and Maria for sharing your thoughts and your experience on this fundamental issue for both women and for men. Thank you also to our listeners; feel free to comment, question, query anything you've heard today at #EurofoundTalks. As always, you can listen back to this podcast and all of our previous editions on youth, sustainable work, the future of Europe. Don't forget to tune in to our upcoming podcasts, which will continue to explore all of the key areas that are related to living and working in Europe today. Please access any other information on any of the issues we've discussed today, particularly looking at the Eurofound or EIGE websites. Follow us on our social media channels and until next time, when Eurofound talks to you.
00:39:06 Outro
