Agenda Europa [Podcast]
Intervention on Portuguese newspaper “Público”’s podcast.
The European Union institutions are preparing for the Conference on the Future of Europe, a forum aimed at listening to European citizens to understand whether or not Europe is on the right track and which measures could be improved to make it more democratic and to better serve the people who compose its big community.
For the European Parliament, this must be an open, interactive and inclusive dialogue. Young people, of course, could not be forgotten. In each episode of “Agenda Europa”, we will be listening to young people’s views on what they expect to be a priority for the European agenda. We start with 24-year-old Catarina Neves, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Languages and International Relations from the University of Porto and a postgraduate diploma in Human Rights from the University of Coimbra. Catarina was one of the founders of BETA Portugal — Bringing Europeans Together Association, and has already worked with institutions such as the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Council of Europe and the United Nations. At the moment Catarina is in Portugal, simultaneously finishing the master’s degree in European Studies from the Catholic University of Leuven and a second bachelor’s degree in Languages Applied to Business Relations.
Catarina, what do you think should be a priority in Europe’s agenda?
Personally, I believe that the European Union should focus more on gender policies. If it was already an important topic in the pre-covid era, with the pandemic crisis it became even more so.
In March, right before the declaration of the pandemic state, the European Commission launched the European Strategy for Gender Equality 2020–2025. It promised a stronger commitment to include gender perspectives in the EU’s various realms of action (including the next budget) and gave a special emphasis to intersectionality. And, even though these dimensions are crucial to the Union’s future, unfortunately, due to the pandemic, it is safe to say they have been completely left aside.
In a pre-covid Europe, there were already a lot of disparities in several areas, from the permanence in the job market and the representativity in politics to the access to health and education. Nevertheless, even if the number of men with university degrees is inferior to that of women, according to the European Commission, women still earn an average of 16% less than men.
And this paradigm seems to focus a little too much on the image of the white female. If we were to place a greater emphasis on the topic of migration, when it comes to migrant and refugee women, or even on disabled and trans women, the indicators would be totally different and the obstacles much bigger. Even with all these constraints, in 2017, the Gender Equality Index in Europe (still with 28 Member States) was 67.4. Portugal was below that average — and that clearly only reinforced that we still have a long way to go.
Now, in 2020, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis exacerbated these difficulties. For example, on October 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the United Nations Secretary-General even highlighted that women are the group at greater risk of poverty. When we look at 2019, which was a year of great advancements in this field, the risk of poverty for EU women was 22%, whereas men’s was 20,2%. Thus, and even though we still do not have reliable and official data, I believe we can draw from previous results to say that the pandemic crisis and its consequences will affect women largely more. And we are talking about a group that not only works from 9 to 5 but also performs unpaid domestic and informal care work which has been sustaining our societies since the beginning of time.
But, of course, at the end of the day, only 39% of the Members of the European Parliament are women. It does not matter how much legislation is debated and approved in the European Parliament to fight this type of tendency: representativity ends up not being the most comprehensive, especially when we think about migrant, disabled or trans women. Therefore, I believe that rethinking the Gender Equality Strategy and thinking about how transversal it must be — from a middle-class family from a Nordic country to the family that has just reached Southern Europe looking for asylum — makes so much sense for the future of the European agenda.
Originally published on October 19, 2020, in Público’s podcasts, featuring young people’s reflections on the future of Europe. Translated and adapted (from English to Portuguese) by me. You can find the original article and other young people’s opinions here:
