EG-S-FP (99) 1

EQUALITY BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN:

PRIORITIES FOR THE FUTURE

 EG-S-FP (99) 1

EQUALITY BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN:

PRIORITIES FOR THE FUTURE

FINAL REPORT OF ACTIVITIES

OF THE

GROUP OF SPECIALISTS ON FUTURE PRIORITIES,

STRATEGIES AND WORKING METHODS
IN THE FIELD OF EQUALITY BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN
(EG-S-FP)

Strasbourg, October 1999

 THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE

The Council of Europe is a political organisation which was founded on 5 May 1949 by ten European
countries in order to promote greater unity between its members. It now numbers 41 European states.1

The main aims of the Organisation are to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and to
develop common responses to political, social, cultural and legal challenges in its member states.
Since 1989 it has integrated most of the countries of central and eastern Europe and supported them in
their efforts to implement and consolidate their political, legal and administrative reforms.

The Council of Europe has its permanent headquarters in Strasbourg (France). By Statute, it has two
constituent organs: the Committee of Ministers, composed of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the
41 member states, and the Parliamentary Assembly, comprising delegations from the 41 national
parliaments. The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe represents the entities of local
and regional self-government within the member states.

The European Court of Human Rights is the judicial body competent to adjudicate complaints brought
against a state by individuals, associations or other contracting states on grounds of violation of the
European Convention on Human Rights.

The Council of Europe and equality between women and men

The consideration of equality between women and men, seen as a fundamental human right, is the
responsibility of the Steering Committee for Equality between Women and Men (CDEG). The experts
who form the Committee (one from each member State) are entrusted with the task of stimulating
action at the national level, as well as within the Council of Europe, to achieve effective equality
between women and men. To this end, the CDEG carries out analyses, studies and evaluations, defines
strategies and political measures, and, where necessary, frames the appropriate legal instruments.

For further information on activities concerning equality between women and men, contact:

Division Equality between Women and Men

Directorate General of Human Rights
Council of Europe
67075 STRASBOURG CEDEX

Tel: +33 3 88 41 23 39
Fax: +33 3 90 21 49 18

1
Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, San
Marino, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”,
Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
 CONTENTS

Introduction...............................................................................................................................4

Part I: Guiding vision for a future that has overcome

gender inequality...............................................................................................6

Part II: Current state of equality efforts and exemplary

strategies in specific areas.................................................................................9

Introduction.........................................................................................................9

1. Education.................................................................................................12
2. Health and violence..................................................................................21
3. Reconciliation of professional, family and private life............................29
4. Media and information technologies.......................................................34

Part III: General characteristics of successful strategies............................................40

Part IV:Assessing mechanisms for implementing

effective strategies............................................................................................43

Part V: Conclusions and recommendations................................................................49

Appendices

Appendix A: Members of the group of specialists..................................................................55

Appendix B: Terms of reference.............................................................................................56

Appendix C: Questionnaire addressed to young people.........................................................58

3
 INTRODUCTION

In 1997, the Steering Committee for Equality between Women and Men (CDEG) of the
Council of Europe set up the Group of specialists on future priorities, strategies and working
methods in the field of equality between women and men (EG-S-FP). This Group, composed
of six experts (see Appendix A), was given specific terms of reference (see Appendix B) and
entrusted, inter alia, with the task of defining “priorities, aims, strategies, tools and working
methods for future activities in the field of equality between women and men”. It was also
asked to propose “concrete actions and projects to be undertaken by the CDEG, other Steering
Committees of the Council of Europe and in member States”.

The Group met five times over a period of two years. 1 The present report is the result not only
of its deliberations and discussions, but also of the Group’s search for innovative projects and
working methods to promote equality throughout Europe. In this context, the Group
commissioned three research studies to gather information on the current state of progress, the
obstacles and any innovative strategies in the fields of education, health care and
reconciliation of work and family life as policy issues of gender equality. It also drew up a
questionnaire in autumn 1997 (see Appendix C) which was distributed to, and answered by,
participants in the activities of the Council of Europe’s Youth Centres, as well as some
university students.

The Group is thankful to Ms Carol Hagemann-White, its Vice-Chair, who co-ordinated the
preparation of the report. Besides drafting much of it herself, she put the various contributions
together in a coherent whole.

The report is composed of five parts:

• Part I sets out the philosophy of the report as a whole. It describes how the Group sees a
future which has overcome gender inequality and how the realisation of gender equality
might fundamentally transform and restructure society. This part may also be read at the
end of the report.

• In Part II, which is the most substantial part, the Group looks into selected areas
(education, health and violence, reconciliation of professional, family and private life,
potential of new information technologies) and gives examples of achievements, obstacles
and innovative strategies.

• Part III draws some conclusions from the specific findings of Part II and sets out the
general characteristics of successful strategies to achieve gender equality.

1
One of the meetings was a consultation meeting between the representative of the CDEG and the Vice-
Chair of the Group, who had the task of drafting the final report of activities.

4
• Part IV attempts to assess the options available for enforcing anti-discrimination
strategies and considers whether they have been employed to their full potential.

• Part V contains the Group’s conclusions, as well as recommendations for concrete action.

The Group hopes that the CDEG and other committees concerned will find these
recommendations useful for their future work and will give them some follow-up in their
programmes of activities. It also hopes that the report will be published and widely
disseminated in member States, both to those who work for the promotion of gender equality
and to those working in the fields dealt with in the report.

5
 PART I

GUIDING VISION FOR A FUTURE THAT HAS OVERCOME

GENDER INEQUALITY

The search for future priorities and strategies should be guided by the vision of a society that
has overcome gender inequality – a vision that can inspire not only women, but men as well,
not only those who know through experience the damage done by discrimination, but also
young people who feel the need for a future worth striving for. The Group of specialists on
future priorities, strategies and working methods in the field of equality between women and
men (EG-S-FP) has found, in its search for fresh approaches and working methods, that in all
European countries, innovative groups, organisations and individuals draw upon elements of
such a vision to generate the creativity, enthusiasm and effort needed for their work. The
terms of reference of the Group of specialists, which include describing ways to raise
awareness, involve men as active participants and tap the potential of youth in working
towards gender equality, demand that we envisage equality as a richer, more humane, more
fulfilling and more truly democratic state of society and way of life.

In the past, issues of inequality have typically been addressed as the claims of groups to
scarce resources. This remains a valid approach to countering deprivation and exclusion; legal
remedies are fundamental to this effort. Yet at the same time, gender inequality runs deeper
than the competing interests of groups. Men and women are uniquely interdependent, and real
change requires putting the relationship between them on a new foundation, enabling women
and men to work together in all areas of life. Merely redistributing rights and resources, as
essential as this can be, will in the long run only lead to new inequities if European society
fails to achieve a new “gender culture”, that is, an interlocking web of values, norms and
socialisation practices open for developing the full potential of all its members, and
supporting new forms of social solidarity that transcend current gender relations.

A new understanding of the many possibilities of being a woman or a man is central to the
project of preserving and valuing diversity in an increasingly closely-woven Europe.
Inequality affects different groups of women – and of men as well! – very differently. Ideals
of femininity that directly oppress some women may be seen as a resource by others,
depending, inter alia, upon their class and ethnic backgrounds and their personal life
histories: this is true, for example, of the norm that all women should be mothers.
Expectations of masculinity that confer power and privilege on some men may rob others of
any chance to attempt self-realisation: an example is the assumption that a man must be the
breadwinner. Yet in all of these diverse situations there has been a common thread, an implicit
guiding principle that the masculine represents the norm, the standard. As a result, there is a
widespread confusion between working for full equality between women and men, and
working for full recognition of women’s interests and self-realisation. Both are vital, but they
are not the same.

The Group found that many blockages and points of resistance to approaching gender equality
arise from the prevalence of a zero-sum perspective and the habit of thinking of policies in

6
terms of winners and losers. The future priority must be to develop policies that transform the
existing gender contract and the gender division of labour for both sexes. This cannot be done
by simply adding questions related to men into policies focused on women’s interests, or by
adding more and more special interest groups to the agenda. Achieving equality means
overcoming the relationship of dominance and subordination inherent in gender inequality.
Often, this will not be a matter of inventing new measures, but of reframing existing
approaches in terms of a dialogue, within which both women and men take on the challenge
of change. The change that is needed affects both women and men to an equal degree, if in
different ways, and thus must involve both women and men in order to succeed.

There is no one formula for realising the ideal of gender equality. It must rather be thought of
as a dynamic equilibrium within each community, with the essential condition that the
boundaries remain open to communication, compromise and change. The common element
within diversity will be a new awareness, a profound shift in ideas, feelings and identities so
that differences between women and men, however else they may be defined, do not privilege
one as primary or superior by virtue of sex/gender.

The existing divisions of labour, of power and of responsibilities according to gender are not
only harmful to women in particular and – less obviously – to men as well; they are also
patently dysfunctional for the complex world of the next millennium. An apparent impasse
with respect to many old and new social problems is symptomatic of societies unable to adapt
to the challenges of the 21st century. Inequality is inefficient and costly; institutions of
economic research and policy need to work seriously towards estimating its costs. Redressing
discrimination against women is not the problem, it is a vital element of the solution. The
achievement of equality will enrich society as a whole.

Implicit in the strategies and projects which will be summarised in the following chapters, the
Group has identified a vision of a society which would:

• recognise and value the work and the responsibilities taken on by women equally with
those of men;
• assure the full reality of equal rights for women and men, translating this fundamental
principle into elaboration of the law, in particular considering the repercussions on
equality of all existing or proposed legal norms;
• eliminate prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination related to sex/gender;
• actively bring about equal participation of women and men in all spheres of society and
areas of life.

With the necessary reservation that a new gender contract does not necessarily signify the
absence of other, or even perhaps new, forms of social inequality, it is nonetheless possible to
suggest what such a transformation could offer. It can be envisioned on three levels: the
interpersonal, the organisational and the level of the whole society.

On the individual level, it will be a society that offers greater personal liberty to all
individuals, free of the psychosocial and normative constraints attached to sex/gender. The
necessary correlate of liberty is wider and deeper education for all, since gender can no longer
be taken to confer ability or aptitude “naturally”, or to exclude anyone from any field.

With gender equality, institutions, groups and organisations will be empowered to address the
problems now “hidden” in quasi-natural gender roles. Collective actors, no longer identified

7
with masculine domination in the public sphere and feminine representation of the domestic
sphere, will seek rational, humane and democratic ways to reconcile the organisation of work,
of schools, of family responsibilities, of care for the sick, disabled and ageing, as well as the
organisation of political and social participation.

And on the level of the polis, of concern for the common good, transcending gender relations
challenges society to reframe the great questions faced by humanity and re-evaluate the
relative importance accorded to their elements, such as:

• the allocation of resources to food, education, promoting social solidarity, armaments,

technology;
• privileging dialogue or conflict in finding solutions for the clashes between interests,
needs and beliefs;
• the relative weight given to knowledge, know-how, knowing how to live, communication
skills and ability to present and represent.

This transformation will have far-reaching consequences. Work, family life, social and
political participation will no longer be shaped by collective actors which represent and
privilege gender roles and gender interests. The field of work will gain from utilising a much
greater pool of aptitudes and abilities, both in the market sector and in the work which
responds to collective needs. Social protection will be independent of family status; a new
equilibrium of work, leisure and interpersonal responsibilities can be developed. Within the
home, the definition of roles will emerge from the aptitudes and preferences of each member,
and it will be recognised as a vital need of the society that all of its members have
responsibilities, and have time available, to care for others and for relationships within their
families and informal social networks. The public sphere will be based on a new
understanding of the interrelationships of caring and justice, of community and citizenship.

A society based on gender equality will be, without doubt, a far healthier environment with a
much greater potential for well being. It promises to enable individuals, families and social
networks to regain control over the resources and conditions of their lives throughout the life
cycle. Beyond eliminating immediate gender-related causes of ill health (such as significant
sources of stress, deprivation and violence), equality is empowering in many ways. The range
of choices, the potential both for social participation and for personal development will
expand for many individuals. A healthy environment is one in which the complex demands of
modern society are not burdened onto individuals beyond their ability to act.

Finally, the restructuring of society to eliminate every form of discrimination, exclusion,

deprivation or disadvantage based on gender is not only a challenge but also a unique
opportunity to revitalise democracy. This will mean reconsidering the very process and
organisational forms of decision-making to which women have had so little access for so
long. While overcoming resistance to their participation still requires active political and legal
measures, it is also evident that both women and youth are often critical of the conditions of
decision-making and choose not to take part. Rekindling the belief in participation as a path
towards social justice is a challenge to be taken up.

8
 PART II

CURRENT STATE OF EQUALITY EFFORTS AND

EXEMPLARY STRATEGIES IN SPECIFIC AREAS

INTRODUCTION
Policies and methods of working towards equality have often based their approaches on
a critical assessment of attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of behaviour which maintain
inequality. The Group agreed that much valuable work has been done and that it is
important to preserve what has been gained. However, there have also been negative
reactions in public opinion, in part due to the fact that equality policies have tended to
focus on the rights and claims of groups, and to a much larger extent on women than on
men. For the future, strategies need to aim at changing the pattern of inequality within
gender relations.

For the first stage of its work, the Group agreed to focus on selected areas and to look at
the achievements, obstacles and innovative strategies in a concrete way. The choice of
areas was guided by the expertise of the members of the Group, as well as by the terms
of reference and by strategic considerations. With the aim of integrating the whole, the
Group then decided to centre its report on education in the broadest sense of the word
and to describe methods of, and approaches to, awareness-raising in all of the specific
areas discussed. Six areas were investigated more closely during the work of the Group;
three of these have been selected for a more extensive discussion in this report.

In the area of formal education, the focus of the Group was particularly on schools, as a
central location for raising awareness among young people, and for encouraging both
boys and girls to recognise how gender equality can meet their needs for respect and
self-realisation and respond to their sense of social justice. Furthermore, education will
be of increasing importance in the future while societies adapt to wide-reaching
economic and social change; it will be a central site for developing ethics of social
responsibility and citizenship.

Promoting health and preventing violence are generally perceived to be important for
the quality of life, both for individuals and communities, yet their relevance to gender
equality is not fully recognised. They are also characteristic issues about which women
have articulated very important concerns, while very little work has addressed how they
affect or involve men. In such areas it seems particularly difficult to develop strategies
which do not fall back on the competing interests of groups, playing them against each
other.

Combining work and family has been a major issue for policy discussion in all the
European countries and on the European level for many years. Yet, progress often seems
painfully slow and the Group felt that there was a widespread sense of “fatigue”.

9
Perhaps this is due to the fact that the problem has been defined narrowly; the focus
needs to be widened to include the balance between professional and personal life in the
broadest sense. There has also been an exclusive approach to organising daily life
within given structures of the economy, of responsibilities for dependent care etc.;
achieving full equality calls for a shift in focus, putting people first.

The influence of the media in shaping attitudes and beliefs, in selecting images of
reality and of possibilities is an element both of stability and of change in gender
relations. Although the increasingly transnational structures of the media make them
less sensitive to national or local viewpoints, the media per se do not determine
opinions or attitudes. Closer attention to distinctions such as those between information,
communication and opinion, or between the press and advertising is necessary to
develop policies that support awareness of the greater human potential offered by
gender equality without colliding with basic human rights and freedoms.

New developments in information technology are interacting with social

transformations to produce changes that are both profound and often unexpected. New
threats and new opportunities, yesterday only a matter for debate among specialists, are
now entering into daily life, and both women and men have no choice but to come to
terms with them. Efforts towards gender equality need to have an early and active
engagement with the forces that are transforming both work and personal life.

The search for innovative strategies was guided by the following ideas:

• equality will enrich society

• equality benefits men as well as women
• equality can help solve major problems of society
• inequality is a waste of human resources
• gender equality is an attainable objective.

The Group gave particular attention to examples of strategies which give concrete
meaning to these ideas.

Finally, it is important to recognise that gender relations exist on three levels:

• on the level of the individual: attitudes, gender identities, habits of behaviour;

• on the level of the whole society: economic structures, social policy, institutions;
• on the intermediate level of organisations, which also have a gender culture.

Strategies for change need to address all three levels.

The first phase of the struggle for gender equality rightly focused on discrimination
against women. In almost every sphere, women were at a disadvantage relative to men.
This continues to be the case, and until it is no longer the norm, the central thrust of the
law and policies must be to build a consensus on measures to eliminate discrimination
against women.

There are a number of reasons why men might support measures which promote
women's equality:

10
• they may recognise that “women’s liberation” is men's liberation too, as in the
freedom to share in parenting and household responsibilities, and removal of the
need to be the sole breadwinner;
• they may yearn for a fairer society for their sisters, wives, daughters and friends;
• they may recognise the economic inefficiency of gender-based discrimination;
• they may perceive gender equality as an inalienable part of social justice.

Such acceptance will be facilitated, however, if it is acknowledged by women – and

policy-makers – that discrimination against men should not be trivialised, ignored or
condoned.

In practice, opposing interests of women and of men can, and often do, obstruct
progress towards achieving equality. The temptation to demean and ridicule the other
group is inherent in such conflicts, and when gender is involved, its sexual connotations
provide a strong motive for the media to highlight or exaggerate them. Thus
exclusionary debates, in which – today – women participate as well as men, have been
in the foreground of media attention. Inclusive strategies recognise the unavoidability of
diverging and contradictory practical interests, but are grounded in understanding
conflict as a productive force which can sharpen awareness of common needs, for
example the shared interest in social cohesion and democracy. Inclusive strategies
towards equality will aim to transform conflicts non-violently and in doing so, to
employ them constructively.

11
1. EDUCATION
Access to education in its entire breadth and depth is one of the oldest demands of
women’s struggle for equality and human rights. After co-education had become an
established principle in most European educational systems, attention was turned to
more subtle forms of discrimination. Beginning in the 60s, studies in many countries
pointed out the predominance of stereotyped images and language in school textbooks,
which exaggerated gender inequality far beyond even its social reality, showing women
in aprons as housewives and men capable of solving any mechanical or mathematical
problem. The “hidden curriculum” in school teaching was made visible, which
discouraged girls from excelling in, or even choosing, fields of study or vocational
training that had a masculine connotation; and these were typically gateways to better
pay, more prestige and opportunities for job advancement. Indeed, there were many
instances of open discouragement, denying girls access to “unfeminine” areas or
ridiculing them for showing such interests. Empirical studies of teacher attitudes and
(unconscious) expectations discovered a widespread tendency to attribute boys’ success
to talent and girls to hard work, and to give much more attention to moving boys ahead
and supporting their achievement.

In Central and Eastern European countries during socialism, gender differentiation was
less evident. The school curriculum was the same for both sexes and girls were expected
to enter technical studies as well as boys. Significant numbers of women received
vocational training and were employed in jobs that were, and still are, predominantly
masculine in Western Europe. With this, the goal of gender equality was considered to
be fulfilled; in all areas that have been associated with the feminine, such as home life
or personal relationships, there was practically no public discussion about equality and
no educational effort to achieve it. In this sense, it has been said that equality was
defined as women functioning as men, while carrying a silent additional burden of
responsibility for the family. If Western schools and society failed to open “masculine”
fields to women, Eastern schools and society failed equally, both to recognise the social
value of “feminine” fields and to open them to men. In the transformation period since
1989 it has proven difficult to place this problem on the educational agenda.

a) What has been achieved?

Throughout Europe today, the right to education and vocational training without
discrimination on the grounds of sex is established as a legal norm. There is a
widespread recognition as well that attitudes, social norms, and cultural pressures act as
obstacles to equality, and it is generally accepted that the educational system not only
should not discriminate, directly or indirectly, but also has a responsibility to work
towards positive acceptance of equal opportunity. This is a solid foundation for
developing strategies, instruments and working methods to build equality.

Much progress has been made towards eliminating both direct and indirect
discrimination against girls in schools, although there is clearly work still to be done to
ensure that all schools throughout Europe are safe, supportive and a fair learning
environment for girls. Mechanisms to monitor progress towards equality in education
have been installed on national, regional and local levels; European statistics are
analysed to identify areas of progress and stagnation. These reflect a widened awareness

12
 that a democratic society must cultivate the abilities and draw on the potential of
women through encouraging and supporting their educational progress. Girls, supported
by their families and by educators, have responded to this atmosphere of encouragement
with more extensive participation and higher achievement, as have women in the field
of further education.

Overall, women and girls now have an equal level of educational attainment with men,
and in many countries they are clearly ahead. The third edition of “Key data in
education in the European Union” issued in February 1998 reports that women average
a higher level of participation in higher education than men, and thus have profited from
the doubled numbers of students in higher education over the past 20 years. In Europe
today, for every 100 boys, 124 girls obtain a general secondary educational
qualification. Clearly, eliminating the obstacles to educating girls has been much more
successful than eliminating differences by social class or minority status: the EU data
show that more than 50% of children from families that already have a higher education
qualification go on to tertiary schooling, but only 17% of those whose parents have not
completed upper secondary education. Among the latter group, sex stereotyping can be
found that restricts girls’ education more than boys’, and this is a problem that should
not be forgotten, but the impact is no longer great enough to counteract the overall
trend.

b) Where are the blockages?

Nonetheless, subtle patterns of inequality are still present. Throughout Europe, in higher
education women are found in the humanities and in medical and health fields, while
men predominate in natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, engineering and
architecture. Thus, it is still true that the fields which are gateways to pay, prestige and
job advancement are strongly masculine. It is not surprising, then, that women’s higher
level of formal education does not pay off to the same degree on the job market. “With
equal qualifications, there are proportionately more women than men out of work”
(Eurostat news release 9/98). Indeed, comparison among countries suggests that
women’s advantage in formal attainment may be higher where the link between the
educational system and the job market is weak, as in Portugal or Greece, while
Germany, where employment has had closer ties to educational credentials, shows the
lowest ratio of women to men.

Expert assessments of progress towards equality in education, whether within their own
country or in surveys over Europe, repeatedly emphasise the deeply rooted “cultural
barrier”1 separating the perceptions and expectations, the self-concepts and aspirations
of girls from those of boys. Yet in the institutions of higher education at which teachers
are trained, issues of gender equality are rarely part of the curriculum. Existing
knowledge and useful methods of practice are not being made available systematically;
teachers and school administrators, unprepared to recognise the mechanisms by which
inequality is reproduced, often fail to realise that gender equality is one of the central
tasks of school pedagogy.

1
See, for example, Maureen BOHAN, “Equality education as a primary response” – Proceedings of the Council
of Europe Information Forum on national policies in the field of equality between women and men, Budapest, 6-
8 November 1995.

13
 Given the simultaneous presence of progress and blockages in this field, the Group
requested Dr Madeleine Arnot to carry out a network strategy search study on education
as a policy issue of gender equality. Her survey of innovative practices in schools in the
United Kingdom1 illuminated the lack of a clear national policy context, but an
unexpectedly strong interest of Local Educational Authorities in equality issues, with a
high willingness to monitor performance differentially for social groups. However,
official statistics have concentrated on general educational attainment with only limited
and inadequate data on vocational qualifications and courses, thus not addressing the
problem of gender segregation.

The most significant finding of the study was the current primacy of “improving boys’
achievement” projects; overcoming boys’ underachievement was either the primary or a
secondary motive of almost all projects contacted (out of 96 named projects, only three
were specifically targeted at girls!). Concern over gender-differentiated performance
levels was almost unanimously expressed as the major issue of gender inequality, either
generally or in terms of a specific task such as literacy. With the emphasis on academic
performance in the narrowest sense (defined as gaining five higher-grade qualifications
in public examinations at 16 and 18) taking centre stage, attempts to address other
aspects of gender relations such as identities, confidence in self, sexual violence and
bullying, or ethnic conflicts appeared only on the margins.

This is a striking contrast to the flowering of equal opportunity policies in the United
Kingdom during the 1980s. Emphasis has shifted from a broad concern for equality
with a focus on supporting girls, to a performance-centred concern for core curriculum
attainment and a focus on boys. Changes in overall educational policy deeply affected
the opportunities and the nature of school interventions in the area of gender equality.
The ensuing “sea change” in the very concept of gender equality illuminates a major
blockage identified by the Group in its work: the danger inherent in defining the
struggle for gender equality, a core element of realising democracy, social cohesion and
social justice, as an issue of the competing claims of social groups. To the extent that a
decade of highly visible efforts to improve the situation of girls was perceived as a
struggle of the “have-nots” against the privileged, the time may have been ripe for a
see-saw effect, in which educators began to ask “what about the boys?”

It is certainly an important social justice concern that in some regions, significant

groups of boys end up leaving school with low formal qualifications and may suffer
long-term unemployment or other forms of social exclusion, perhaps drifting into crime;
and it is very positive to see schools seeking innovative action to change this. Yet the
gender basis of these problems remains unexplored when they are conceptualised as a
disadvantage relative to girls.

Already, in most European countries, as women gain more independence while the
economy is globalized, familiar links between masculinity, professional success and
public performance are becoming anachronistic. The underdevelopment of men’s skills
in the private or personal sphere becomes more visible, many men fail to live up to
women’s expectations of their involvement in practical and emotional care and find it
difficult to build a stable relationship with their children. Public education is urgently
called upon to prepare both boys and girls for an adult life in which rules of gender no
1
Madeleine ARNOT et al, “Current innovative practice in schools in the United Kingdom”, November 1998.

14
 longer provide simple answers. While it has been relatively easy for girls and women to
broaden their vision of what being a woman might include, they have also remained
trapped in the fallacy that, to “have it all”, they must also “do it all” themselves. Girls
are, indeed, encouraged to choose non-traditional subjects and careers, but they are
being left alone with the problem of how these are to be combined with private life, for
the very simple reason that there is no ideal individual solution: it cannot be their
problem to solve alone. Boys, on the other hand, are only rarely being taught to broaden
their horizon of what being a man might include; at best they are offered a few practical
skills, such as learning to sew on a button. The educational system, with its one-sided
focus on cognitive skills, has largely avoided dealing with the profound fears which the
very thought of a strong involvement of men in private life, in caring and interpersonal
responsibility still seems to awaken. Education has failed to address the emotional and
social illiteracy with which many boys enter adolescence, although a number of diverse
areas exist, such as sports, religion, sex education, or education for democracy, as well
as voluntary activities in theatre, photography or communication, which readily lend
themselves to such an effort.

c) New approaches

i. Projects addressing sexism in the school environment and curriculum

Although the critical study of school textbooks and their use of images and language
goes back some 20 years in many countries, imaginative new approaches are often
needed to change both teaching materials and the subjects themselves to be more
gender-balanced. For one thing, the approach to change must be adapted to the language
and the culture; there seems to be a move away from “cookie-cutter” approaches and
towards drawing on diversity.

The conscious change of language is a very sensitive area. Spanish is a gendered

language as well as a tongue which offers a choice of level of formality. The range of
possibilities has not always been used against women. Rather, in some respects, the
different choices the language permits have helped to secure the status of women in
ways English does not. Nevertheless, language has still a long way to go in the battle for
equality. In most Spanish schools teachers have now guidelines to improve equality
through better use of the Spanish language. The project, called “en femenino y en
masculino” tries to avoid generalisations usually expressed in the masculine gender.
School children are taught to use the feminine nouns and adjectives when referring to
women in the professions. The project, carried out by the Women’s Institute1, is having
a positive effect in the media; most newspapers now do use both the masculine and the
feminine to refer to women and men who are cabinet ministers, members of the
judiciary, or army officers. Experts differ on the cause of this positive results. In Spain
there are more female university graduates than male; this fact has also contributed to
the spread of more gender-balanced language.

Another persistent problem area, also identified in studies as long as twenty years ago,
is the undercurrent of masculine violence and sexual harassment in schools. Recent
1
The Women’s Institute (Instituto de la Mujer) was founded in 1983 under the aegis of the Spanish
Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs with the objective of promoting equal opportunities and the participation
of women in political, cultural, economic and social life.

15
 heightened concern about disruptive behaviour, bullying and open violence in schools –
all of which may also involve girls as aggressors, not only as victims – has given new
impetus to the search for strategies to address and change this aspect of gender relations
among children and youth. There is reason to believe that aggressiveness in girls is
more likely to arise in a context where acceptance and power relate to disruptive
masculine behaviours, so that working to change gender-based violence is the most
promising strategy to prevent or reduce all forms of violence in schools, as well as
reducing the risk of after-school and leisure-time violence against girls, of which gang
rape cases reported in the media are only the tip of an iceberg.

The project “developing norms and codes for non-discrimination” in the Flemish
community of Belgium suggests an approach that could easily be implemented with a
gender perspective, although the brief case study to the Council of Europe symposium
on violence in schools1 does not mention gender at all. The existing state policy,
requiring schools to have an anti-discrimination code defined with respect to ethnic
minorities, was taken as a starting point, thus linking an innovative strategy into
existing, accepted policy. The project opted for a “bottom-up” strategy, on the premise
that the will not to discriminate has to be a living part of students’ school life, and chose
to take all kinds of differences, discriminations and effects of social exclusion into
consideration, with the goal of teaching students to handle and appreciate differences.
This example suggests that future equality policy could be much more imaginative in
taking up strategies that have set related goals, such as intercultural understanding,
peace, health or democratic citizenship, and lending them a gender perspective: often
this would be only a small step.

Building a foundation for gender equality in the future must include educating young
people in the sphere of sexuality. This has always been an area in which girls are
particularly vulnerable and boys under particular pressure to perform successfully; the
search for social and personal identity in adolescence thus often leads to re-creating
gender patterns which limit, rather than expand, opportunities for learning and living.
Inability to develop secure, respectful and responsible actions and responses in the
sphere of sexual behaviour is a major source of dishonest and abusive interaction habits,
of sexualised violence, of teenage pregnancies and abortions, and of the continuance of
all forms of sexism. Gender equality cannot be achieved without establishing respect for
sexual identity.

The problem has been exacerbated in the past decade by the flood of stereotyped sexual
images and soft and hard pornography that have become available to all age groups
through the media. In Eastern Europe, magazine and television presentations underwent
dramatic changes in the shift to a market economy; in Western Europe, the rapid
expansion of computer games, videos and Internet access available to youth and to
children have also meant a qualitative change in their exposure to images of sexuality.

In many European countries, sex education is still seen as the responsibility of the
family; but not only are families today confronted with numerous other strains and
demands that make it difficult for them to transmit values, it is clearly beyond the scope
of individual parents to respond to such massive marketing of sexuality in an effective

1
Symposium “Violence in schools: awareness-raising, prevention, penalties” organised by the Council
for Cultural Co-operation (CDCC) of the Council of Europe in Brussels, Belgium, on 26-28 November 1998.

16
 way. For good or ill, sexuality is no longer something only discussed in the private
sphere, it has a large – and yet often not acknowledged – place in public discourse, and
thus must be addressed in the public education system.

Some countries have well-established frameworks for sex education in the schools,
however, existing programmes and teaching tools have been criticised for their
excessive focus on cognitive biological information, neglecting the emotional and social
dimensions of sexuality. Many have not addressed issues of gender adequately or at all.
Nonetheless, this is a field in which creative efforts towards promoting gender equality
have been made, which should be made available more broadly as examples of good
practice. For many European countries, however, establishing sex education in schools
is not a realistic option; there are issues of teaching time, teacher training, cost and
customs which oppose a centralised and state-directed curriculum approach. An
alternative approach can be co-operation, for example between NGOs and schools. In
Spain, recognition that the state is not financially able to install national programmes
addressing the many issues brought forth by social change has led to an opening of
public and private schools to the active presence of NGOs engaged in the relevant areas.
In this way, extra-curricular activities are being transformed into de facto curricular
subjects, especially in matters related to sex education, AIDS prevention, social
solidarity awareness, development programmes in third-world countries, and inclusive
attitudes regarding minorities. Another form of such co-operation has been the signing
of protocols between parent-teacher associations and universities to foster non-sexist
education and character education (for example, encouraging “feminine” values such as
caring in men). A third approach involves co-operation between NGOs and market
enterprises. Such an alliance is making information and prevention available throughout
Hungary via teenage gynaecological wards in hospitals; while in a new programme
there, trained nurses will go into schools to give instructions on sexuality and birth
control.

The key to such strategies in the creative mobilisation of resources while ensuring social
responsibility.

ii. Projects addressing gender segregation and tracking

The Committee on Science and Technology of the Parliamentary Assembly of the

Council of Europe1 has recognised that masculine hegemony keeps women away from
knowledge and occupations which play a key role in modern society; this fact “is unfair
and harmful both for women and for society as a whole which deprives itself of their
skills.”

The persistent difficulty of translating a vision of educational equality into reality has
led educators, policy-makers and parents in some countries to reconsider single-sex
schooling either on an all-school basis, or as a class-by-class or lesson-unit method of
ensuring that girls receive quality attention and support as well as a learning atmosphere
free from discrimination. By contrast to a past era, such experiments and policies are
today firmly based on a commitment to giving girls both full access to all aspects of the
fields in question and the highest available quality of instruction. In Germany, for some
20 years there have been awareness-raising campaigns, model projects, and curriculum
1
Doc. AS/Science (1998) 11.

17
innovations aimed at broadening girls’ access to study areas, especially to the sciences
and engineering, with only very moderate success; recently, some states have
proclaimed an official policy that schools may set up sex-segregated classes in the
sciences. In the United Kingdom, efforts towards equal opportunity in schools have
heightened awareness of gender-differentiated learning styles. On this foundation, the
shift to concern for boys’ achievement does not have to obliterate prior work towards
teaching methods that draw on learning styles typical of girls. An important element in
single-sex teaching within coeducational schools seems to be its flexible deployment.
Research has shown that preferred learning styles are never universal within either sex,
and that the less typical approach is also accessible to both groups. Thus, although using
one’s preferred learning style may make entrance into an area easier, it is important to
acquire some skill in alternative styles as well. With appropriate materials, teaching
methods can be adapted to either approach.

Another strategy for achieving gender balance in fields of study consists of direct
measures to locate talented young women with an interest in areas with gender
imbalance. Both Austria and Germany have developed specific scholarship and project-
promotion programmes to encourage young women to qualify for and choose scientific
careers. It should be noted that such strategies also meet with scepticism; discussion of
such measures in France tends to point to the danger of naturalising gender-based
differences; yet there is agreement on the need for measures to promote women’s
scientific careers and to provide girls and young women with contact to role models.

Scepticism towards revision of the sciences seems especially strong in Central and
Eastern European countries where, during the socialist period, women were present in
substantial numbers in the very fields socially associated with masculinity in the West.
Yet, given the high price that women paid for fulfilling unquestioned masculine norms
while carrying the burden of devalued feminine responsibilities, a debate on the ways in
which masculine culture permeates both the organisational culture of academia and the
content and patterns of access to high-prestige academic fields is needed throughout
Europe. Placing women in a position to push this debate forward seems a useful
strategy, as is the creation of specific networks and conferences for the purpose. There
are clear indications that in the transformation period since 1989, much of the
knowledge, skills and talent of women in Eastern Europe has been lost from fields that
have undergone a “masculinisation” process. Centres of feminist studies at universities
in these countries are an essential tool to observe, call attention to, and help counteract
such trends.

iii. Holistic projects of institutional and cultural reform

Many of the interesting approaches share the characteristic of taking a holistic approach,
which has three main aspects:

• an integrated understanding of learning, behaviour, attitudes and cognition;

• the promotion of gender-sensitive education through a whole-school policy;
• encouraging innovation from the bottom up, developing strategies of change with,
not for, those who are to carry them out.

An example of this approach is to be found in a primary school near Tromsø in Norway.

The project emerged from the school’s systematic use of a pedagogical method of

18
 reinforcement of positive behaviour, which they found had an especially positive effect
on the more quiet and dutiful pupils, but also could motivate disruptive children to find
it ”fun to be nice”. Positive reinforcement led to girls becoming more visible in the
school landscape, and this in turn led the staff to give more systematic attention to
gender-typical behaviour patterns. The project is predicated on the view that adults need
insight into their own behaviour in order to work systematically towards changing
children’s behavioural competence.1 As other projects in the Arnot report have found,
asking staff to discuss their own gender-related attitudes and behaviour can be
provoking and demanding; thus the school policy could only be developed on the basis
of an overall staff commitment to the reinforcement method, and required an
atmosphere of “openness, humour and support from others” in dealing with the
recurring gaps between ideal and reality.

The essence of this school project lies in keeping its eye on the needs of both girls and
boys, and on overcoming the split between them. By focusing on the positive traits of
the girl and boy cultures, the school was able to define the aim of gender equality work
on a practical level as “to get girls to acquire the positive side of the boys’ culture and
for the boys to acquire the positive behaviour traits of the girls”. It is notable that both
girls and boys are supported in drawing up personal limits which members of the other
sex may try to overstep, thus recognising that boys also experience invasive and
discriminating treatment by girls. Both are not merely rewarded for their positive
actions, but challenged to learn the behaviour less familiar to them: single-sex and
mixed-age play groups can be a means of giving leadership training to girls and training
at caring for boys. With a conscious focus on positive, pro-social behaviour at the heart
of the project, addressing all forms of violence, bullying and sexism become central, but
not in the form of sanctions but through teaching and rewarding constructive
alternatives.

There are currently several transnational projects within the Equality Programme of the
European Commission that address working towards gender equality in education in
innovative ways. The eight-country (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy,
Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom) school project “Arianne” has as its goal
“broadening adolescent masculinity”. The project aims to help boys understand the
cultural pressures towards masculinity which they experience, make them aware of the
effects of aggressive behaviour and explore alternatives, and to encourage them to
reconsider and/or rediscover their interest in family and domestic life and its values. The
project is based on the commitment of the staff of each participating school to educating
young people for democracy. Arianne explicitly seeks to identify strategies of
transcending traditional configurations of masculinity that would be appropriate to each
country or region, as well as strategies which promote mutual understanding between
boys and girls: in particular, boys are encouraged to understand the feminine
perspective, and the project tries to lay the foundation for a shift in values with respect
to the split between public and private life. The experience of these projects suggests
that transnational networking between schools might be a fruitful approach to
broadening boys’ and girls’ awareness. It is well known that exchange programmes help
young people to mature and develop self-assurance as well as tolerance, yet these are
very often dependent on parents’ initiatives and pupils’ school achievement.

1
“It is fun to be nice” – a brief report about a project at Krokelvdal School in Tromsø, Norway.

19
As the experience of the United Kingdom shows, the media are also a powerful tool in
creating awareness of gender issues in education, although such issues can also be
distorted when only one aspect (such as gender difference in examinations in specific
subjects, or concern about violence in schools) is picked up and dramatised out of
context. With the trend towards decentralisation and deregulation in public education on
the rise, the influence of the media must grow, as schools adjust to thinking of parents
as potential customers and set their priorities accordingly. Innovative strategies are
called for to draw on the potential for a new ethics of social responsibility and social
justice in this emerging landscape. For example, a partnership could be forged between
a university with a strong focus on gender-related research in education and teacher
training, innovative schools, and media to present issues of concern to parents in a way
that is responsible, well-founded and lively. Education will be central to citizenship in
the next millennium; strategies are needed that take full account of its power.

20
2. HEALTH AND VIOLENCE
It has long been evident to those working in the field that violence against women must
be a health concern; the Beijing Platform for Action defines it as “any act of gender-
based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological
harm or suffering to women”. Only recently has the link between health and human
rights come into the foreground, and with it the awareness that promoting health
requires, inter alia, eliminating violence against women; this was an important theme at
the first European conference on health and human rights held in the Council of Europe
in March 1999.1 The gender dimension of this link becomes obvious when we consider
that its re-discovery is credited to Jonathan Mann in the context of developing a global
response to the AIDS pandemic. In his view, the core of the health and human rights
connection is the relationship between dignity and health. Dignity and equality are
inseparable.

Gender inequality is deeply rooted in everyday life, families, gender identities and
interpersonal relations. Awareness of the everyday and intimate nature of inequality was
raised by public discussion of violence against women, as well as by the study of gender
socialisation with its impact on women’s health and well-being. Both issues have been
debated in terms of their underpinning gender relations of unequal power.

To help envision inclusive strategies which aim at transforming, rather than reiterating,
the negative dimensions of present gender relations, the Group has chosen to look at the
interrelated but distinct areas of health and violence together. In doing so, it is vital to
distinguish between:

i. working to end violence against women;

ii. the need to integrate knowledge about violence into health promotion and health
care;
iii. overcoming gender inequality with respect to health in the broadest sense of the
World Health Organisation (WHO), and within health care in a narrower sense.

i. Working to end violence against women

Awareness of violence against women as a significant social problem has made

considerable progress over the past 20 years; it is now recognised to be widespread in
all European countries, occurring throughout society. Although there is a clear need to
make more energetic and consistent use of criminal law, this alone will not address a
vast proportion of the problem. Ending gender-based violence will require changing
widespread and deeply rooted concepts of masculinity and femininity as well as of
acceptable power imbalances within the family and the community. It is now widely
recognised that men can, and should, be actively involved in bringing about change, yet
in practice this is proving a difficult challenge, especially since projects and agencies
that support women who have suffered violence rarely have sufficient resources or a
secure basis for their essential work.

1
European Conference on Health and Human Rights, organised by the Nordic School of Public Health,
with the support of the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg on 15-16 March 1999.

21
 ii. The need to integrate knowledge about violence into health promotion
and health care

It may seem self-evident that violence does harm, both to physical and to mental health,
and that intimate and domestic violence are especially detrimental to well-being in
social terms as well. Yet violence against women and health are rarely linked in policy
discussions, and the link between the two plays a minimal role, if it appears at all, in
education and professional training for those who work in the health care system. In
most European countries, nurses, midwives, physicians and health workers receive no
information during their formal training on how to recognise the effects of domestic
and/or sexual violence or how to respond adequately to its effects and to the danger of
its continuation. Few strategies have been developed for integrating awareness of
violence against women into mainstream health care.

iii. Overcoming gender inequality with respect to health in the broadest

sense of the WHO, and within health care in a narrower sense

As early as 1946, the WHO defined health as “A state of complete physical, mental and
social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Nevertheless, in
policy debates a narrow medical model of health still prevails, leading to a confusion of
health promotion with the provision of health care and services, often better described
as society’s response to illness. It is often unclear what should be considered an
indicator of gender inequality in the sphere of health. Central issues that have been
raised by women’s health movements can be summarised as access (are women’s needs
met?), quality (are conditions and services appropriate to needs?) and power (who
decides, individually and socially, what furthers the well-being of women?).

***

For this chapter, in addition to its own expertise, the Group was able to draw on the
results of the Council of Europe’s Group of specialists for combating violence against
women (EG-S-VL), in particular the overview of the multiple links between women’s
health problems and violence in its final report of activities (Section 14).1 It also
commissioned a network strategy search study on health care as a policy issue of gender
equality, for which experts, organisations and practitioners of health care in Austria,
Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were consulted.2 The study sought
information on the current state of progress and/or obstacles in this field and described
strategies that seem able to overcome typical blockages.

a) What has been achieved?

In many Western European countries, activism on issues of women’s health has existed for
about two decades and has led to establishing a number of local women’s health centres or
initiatives as well as refuges, services, counselling and therapy for women who have
experienced violence from men. As a result, specific risks of women, but also the resources
1
EG-S-VL (97) 1 – Final report of activities of the Council of Europe’s Group of specialists for
combating violence against women, including a Plan of Action for combating violence against women.
2
“Network strategy search study on health care” prepared by Dr Vera LASCH and Ms Sabine BOHNE.

22
 available to them and their changing health needs throughout the life cycle have become
more visible.

Alongside this, exchange of experience and knowledge has been furthered by building
regional and national networks. More recently, European networks have been established,
such as WAVE, the European network of women’s organisations working in the field of
combating violence against women and children, which meets annually. Within the 4th
medium-term Community action Programme of the European Union on equal
opportunities for men and women, a transnational network EWHNET was initiated in
1997, linking organisations working in the field of women’s health through meetings and
workshops as well as being accessible on the Internet (http\\www.ifg-frauenforschung.de).

Within these and other networks it has become evident that there are different types of
effective strategies, and that the emergence and reliance on one or the other seems to
depend on a number of context variables such as strength of women’s NGOs, existence of
concerned men’s groups, involvement of women’s policy machinery in health issues, and
openness of the health care system to new impulses and equality concerns. Strategies that
have had significant impact include:

1) Creating a public discussion on previously “invisible” problems such as sexualised

and/or domestic violence, or eating disorders, in connection with establishing
specific services, self-help organisations and other resources for those who suffer
from them;
2) Raising awareness through strategies of empowerment with respect to specific health
concerns of women (e.g. movements to make home birth available and accepted);
3) Establishing independent health centres or services offering exemplary gender-
sensitive information, education and practical care, and lobbying for adoption of
their methods;
4) Changing health care practices within the established system of general health care
(by way of training practitioners, influencing recommendations of medical
organisations, negotiating with insurers, etc.);
5) Integrating the promotion of gender awareness and of gender-related knowledge and
skills into public health policy on the local, regional and national levels.

For the most part, these strategies have been pursued with a focus on the needs of women;
however, in some cases they have also been developed to articulate concepts of gender-
sensitivity for both women and men. The extent to which this occurs seems to relate to
more general preferences within equality approaches of NGOs, their degree of co-
operation with one another and with governmental policy agencies. In all countries,
however, raising awareness of women’s specific health and violence concerns has been the
first step towards gender consciousness. In particular, a certain “critical mass” of services,
centres or projects for women seems to be an important precondition for awareness-
raising in this field.

b) Where are the blockages?

A major blockage is the widespread lack of awareness that health is a relevant area of
gender inequality. It is still rare for a country to have a national or regional health policy
which includes gender issues in its purview at all (some exceptions: the Netherlands
since 1987, the Healthy Cities programmes in Vienna and Glasgow). NGOs and

23
researchers frequently cite findings from the United States, which may not be valid for
the European context. There is a clear need for gender-sensitive data collection,
statistics and research.

National health reporting systems, on the whole,

• tend to focus on illnesses and not on health in the broad sense of the WHO;
• take little account of gender differences in life context and their health consequences;
• fail to address reproductive health or sexual and domestic violence;
• give little or no attention to occupational health hazards of women, including those
related to multiple roles and lack of resources.

Correspondingly, progress towards integrating gender-related knowledge and skills into

health care practice has been slow and sporadic, and the need to do so is often not well
understood. More fundamentally, the framework of privilege versus disadvantage, taking
away from the dominant group to give to the oppressed, does not function well in the area
of health. Men do not need to become less healthy for women to become more so.

Progress in addressing gender-based violence has been uneven within Europe. An

Austrian survey in 1995 including 11 European countries estimated that approximately
800 to 1,000 shelters for battered women exist in Europe. The number is certainly
higher, and it seems likely that well over half of those in the survey are located in the
United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, countries in which shelters were
introduced on a widening basis from the 70s onwards. The distribution of rape crisis
centres and hotlines seems to be more uneven still; numbers could not be located, but it
is not unusual for a country report to an international body to name the opening of one
rape trauma centre as a significant event.

Strategies towards overcoming violence have differed. Some countries have focused
primarily on providing services for women after victimisation; others have stressed a
more general equality strategy in the hope of reducing women’s vulnerability to
victimisation; yet others have not yet found it possible to provide women with either
safe refuges or economic independence and have emphasised changing values, or more
decisive criminal justice action against perpetrators. As of yet none of these approaches,
by itself, has proven able to reduce the extent or the impact of violence; an integrated
approach is required.

There is general agreement among experts that appropriately designed shelters and
hotlines offering a woman escape from immediate danger, linked with services which
support her in planning for her personal safety as well as recovering from the traumatic
effects of violence, are vital to creating an atmosphere of “zero tolerance” in the
community. They have great impact as advocacy groups for women with respect to a
wide range of kinds of victimisation, raising awareness in society and its institutions. At
the same time, in countries which introduced shelters early, it has been found that to
focus exclusively on women-oriented strategies is not enough, since they can neither be
truly preventive in their approach, nor call the perpetrators of violence to account. When
a society settles for creating services for women and does no more, violence is defined
as a woman’s problem.

24
 Strategies are needed which respect women’s needs and assure their safety, while
placing emphasis on men as the group challenged to recognise and change patterns of
domination, control and violence towards women as a severe detriment to social health
and community life. Obstacles in the way of such strategies seem to be, as with the
development of gender-sensitive (rather than women-only) health promotion
approaches:

• lack of a dialogue between projects that raise awareness of previously “invisible”

problems and actors within the health care and social welfare systems;
• denial of acceptance (e.g. by health insurers, physicians, governmental agencies) and
respect of the work of innovative experts such as shelter staff or women’s health
centres;
• real concerns about the diversion of funding away from much-needed services to
women (thus reviving the very inequality of resources that equality policy aims to
redress);
• very small numbers of men and of men’s organisations that articulate an interest in
changing dominant concepts of masculinity and of men’s entitlements, and
credibility problems surrounding some of these that do exist;
• an overall tendency to treat gender issues as special-interest concerns rather than as
issues of the quality of life in communities, a tendency which, paradoxically,
becomes more pronounced, the more dramatic the concrete effects and consequences
that come to light.

c) New approaches

i. Empowerment of women

Especially in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, local initiatives and projects to
support women whose health is severely at risk through violence, homelessness or poverty
have been started, despite very difficult conditions and often without any of the financial or
political support to which the Western projects have owed much of their success. These
initiatives are sometimes not even known to the relevant governmental agencies; they
depend for their existence on enormous energy, improvisation and determination of local
groups; some also succeed in gaining temporary funding from North American
foundations. It should be a European priority to encourage and strengthen these initiatives.
East-West co-operation suggests that grass-roots projects in the formerly socialist
countries, with a different history of equality discourse, are likely to differ from Western
models. Support for their innovative development will increase the diversity of models
available for adaptation to local conditions.

Overall, the initial impetus towards change has come from women's collective protests
against indignity and harm. An important element of innovation is therefore the
empowerment of women to be secure in making their own judgements, decisions and
evaluations.

25
ii. Using NGO experience to change legal frameworks

There are some important new initiatives to improve the legal framework in order to
reduce violence against women. It appears that both the useful approaches to providing
services and the needs of women experiencing violence differ according to the regional
context. In some countries immediate refuge in crisis for battered women has been seen as
a primary need, and organisations in the voluntary sector have set up large numbers of
shelters to meet this need. In Austria, the shelter network was able to build on its
experience to participate as a partner in drafting the 1998 law allowing police to remove a
violent man from the woman’s home and to enforce a rule that he remain away for at least
seven days. In Sweden, against the background of a high level of women’s employment
and a differing social discourse on equality, shelters have found that women contact them
during working hours, and have focused on educating women and girls on safety planning,
while crisis intervention is seen as the task of state agencies. One can see the impact of a
different history on the relative roles of state and voluntary organisations. There, years of
awareness-raising have led to the establishment of new initiatives within the police,
hospitals and social services.

iii. Cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approaches

Scanning the field of practice in different countries for new approaches to women’s health
suggested that the innovative quality of successful projects can derive from cutting across
boundaries. They are often interdisciplinary, thereby undermining hierarchies of
knowledge. They are likely to link theory, political activism and practical health care or try
to set up a systematic flow of information in both directions among these kinds of activity
and expertise without privileging one in particular. In fact, projects seem most likely to
expand their influence over time when they have such links.

After the establishment of specific projects and services, it becomes possible and desirable
to integrate their knowledge and procedures into the mainstream of health care. This also
opens up potential for more inclusionary strategies, allowing for an organic transition from
a woman-centred special project to a more inclusionary field of action. Some
projects/organisations have become very successful on a regional or national level in
gaining influence on general health care, whereas others concentrate on outreach to women
who feel their needs are not met by existing services. An important condition for
developing wider impact is the recognition by policy-shaping agencies that they need (and
should actively seek) the expertise of the women's health and counter-violence projects,
which have a valuable store of knowledge, skills and educational experience.

iv. Transcending the gender divide

Projects offering specific services to women create visibility and raise awareness, but there
has also been some success in developing more inclusive strategies. Shelters may, for
example, work in tandem with projects engaged in changing violent men; some exemplary
work of this type is being done in the United Kingdom and in Norway as well as in other
countries.

26
There seems to be a high level of transnational agreement among the experts on a
conceptual framework for woman-friendly or gender-sensitive health care, which
involves:

• overcoming stereotyped images of masculinity and femininity where these have guided
concepts of health care;
• recognition of violence as a pervasive problem, requiring both adequate responses to
consequent health problems and effective measures of prevention;
• taking an holistic rather than symptom-oriented approach to health, taking account of
socialisation, life circumstances, cultural context;
• emphasising patient-centred consultation and co-operative rather than hierarchical
relationships in the provision of care;
• equipping customers with the information they need to make considered choices and
active participation possible; strengthening potential for self-help and self-care.

Such standards of good practice evidently promise to benefit men as well as women.

Interviews with experts suggest that positive experience of progress is connected to a

process of interaction between mainstreaming and awareness-raising. Without such
interaction, mainstreaming alone may fail to include the important insights deriving from
many years of work on women’s health. In the Netherlands, gender impact assessment
today may well include, for example, the hospital management examining whether the
staff has been trained to recognise symptoms of sexual abuse. In other countries, where
violence has been defined by policy-makers as a criminal justice issue or a family problem,
gender impact assessment in hospital policies might not consider the issue of violence at
all. Thus, in order to effect real change, mainstreaming must be linked with work from the
bottom up as well as from the top down, including mechanisms for participation of groups
and organisations that are in direct contact with victims, disadvantaged groups and
innovative activities.

v. Teaching the health care system to address violence

There are surprisingly few projects in Europe which call on the institutions of the health
care system to respond to gender-based violence with sensitivity and specific competence.
Where they do exist, the focus has been on rape, sexual assault or sexual abuse.

The first rape trauma centre in Norway opened in 1986, located within a hospital in Oslo,
and it has served as a model for planning similar projects elsewhere, for example in
Germany. In Sweden, the national centre for raped and battered women was founded in
1994 and located in the Uppsala university hospital system within the women’s clinic. It
now offers both care, treatment and counselling to women with acute needs, and further
training to the staff of the entire clinic as well as professional groups in the region to
educate them on their appropriate professional response. The Swedish government has
made a commitment to require further education on this model from all professionals in
the justice and the health care systems, and the Uppsala centre is now co-operating with
the medical faculty to make training on response to violence part of the education of all
medical and health care personnel.

27
 In Geneva, the university hospital has developed a programme offering care, counselling
and treatment to everyone touched by violence, comprising three groups: victims,
perpetrators and witnesses; it works through a broad community network and receives
referrals from physicians, social workers and others. This programme is neither restricted
to violence against women, nor to victims, although not surprisingly, women suffering
from domestic violence form the vast majority of the clientele (however, participation of
aggressors is gradually increasing). This approach has the potential to address male-to-
male violence as well, which is not unconnected to sexualised violence. Conceptually and
in its methodology, the programme is very sensitive to the gendered nature of interpersonal
violence; yet in addressing violence broadly, framed as a human rights issue, the Geneva
hospital has been able to win wide co-operation in the community and is gathering
experience on working with violent men.1

vi. Inclusive strategies involving men and young people

In the area of violence against women, there are important examples of projects and
programmes which work towards men taking responsibility for male violence and
overcoming it. Evidently, some groups and individual men have begun to find it intolerable
that masculinity and men’s social interactions should continue to support violence against
women.

On the other hand, concern about gender-specific health concerns among men, although
they clearly exist, do not yet seem to generate extensive activity, although there may be a
potential that has been unrecognised. Some small local men’s projects have found it easier
to reach men via health issues than by directly advocating changing gender inequality or
addressing violence. It seems plausible that the symptom- and disease-oriented model of
health and the high-tech emphasis of health related research and policy fit too well with a
dominant model of masculinity, inclining men to believe that they are as well-served as
can reasonably be expected.

Many women’s health initiatives are sceptical about their own success in reaching young
people. One effective strategy seems to be to go into schools and offer health- and
prevention-related units in the classroom. Experts find a proactive strategy useful: The
girls don’t come to us, we have to go to them. Some successful youth projects work with
both girls and boys, but not always together (e.g. a single-sex discussion unit followed by a
joint session).

It seems that young people are not inclined to respond to a direct approach to the issue of
health as their primary concern, and are even more unlikely to identify violence as an area
of active interest. Both issues highlight aspects of vulnerability and risk that adolescents
tend to avoid thinking about. Approaches may be needed which speak about the
possibilities for a richer and more satisfying life; it may be more promising, however, to
begin with more general issues of social justice, and within these, educate young people on
empowerment as well as on practical alternatives to behaviour that does harm to self and
others. A more extensive network strategy search study combined with a “forum on the
future” with experts working with young people might help to find ways of moving
forward in this area.
1
Consultation interdisciplinaire de médecine et de prévention de la violence (CIMPV), Hôpitaux
Universitaires de Genève – Rapport d’activité 1998.

28
29
3. RECONCILIATION OF PROFESSIONAL, FAMILY AND PRIVATE LIFE
During the second half of the 20th century, there has been a clear move away from
subordinating women to the family and towards giving them a real access to the labour
market. Anti-discrimination laws, measures to protect maternity (pregnancy and breast-
feeding) as well as positive action to promote women in the workplace have been
introduced. This has been crucial for their economic independence, their empowerment
and the balance of power between women and men in society.

Nonetheless, the private sphere, in particular child and elderly care, has continued to be
assigned to women as being mainly their responsibility. Women have had to combine
paid and unpaid work to a much greater extent than men, and this has often resulted in a
double workload and in feelings of culpability and frustration. Extensive research and
evaluation studies of equality efforts have given us a more profound understanding. We
now know that the persistence of a gender division of labour in private life is not to be
explained by individual agreements between couples; it is interwoven with the
organisation of the work sphere as a whole. Thus one of the greatest challenges to the
realisation of equality between women and men has been – and still is – creating
conditions in society which support successful reconciliation of the interdependent
domains of professional, family and private life.

a) What has been achieved?

The Group is aware of the many achievements in this field and of the main strategies
and measures that are presently aimed at improving the reconciliation of work and
family life and the sharing of care responsibilities between women and men. Among
these are parental leave regulations, flexible or reduced working hours, job sharing,
provision of suitable private or public care provisions for children and the elderly. They
are extremely important and have helped both women and men to solve the practical
problems linked to finding a balance between professional and private life. They have
also enabled more and more young people throughout Europe to envision their own
future as one of sharing the satisfactions and the burdens of a fuller life with their
partners. However, they have not yet had a significant impact on the gender division of
responsibilities as a whole, and young couples are cutting down their vision of equal
partnership to fit a reality that does not allow its fulfilment.

b) What are the blockages?

Besides the fact that women are still seen as responsible for the private sphere and for
taking care of the family, the dominating culture in most workplaces functions
according to the masculine norm, where the main values are hierarchy, competition and
individualism. This dominating culture also creates a hierarchy between the private and
the public sphere, in which the public sphere/work comes first. In such an atmosphere,
family/private life is always subordinated to professional life, and this means that
personal lives of employees need to be adapted to the demands of the
enterprise/organisation and to the existing economic objectives. Most strategies and
measures to reconcile work and family life have been created respecting this hierarchy,
and have mostly been aimed at enabling women – and men – to do their job without any
interference in their private life.

30
 The dominance of a masculine gender culture in firms, corporations and public entities
gives rise to conflicts that invade the private sphere of men and women following the
eruption of gender dysfunctions at work. Many organisations attempt to overcome this
conflict by normatively prescribing the values of the dominant gender and marginalising
those socially associated to femininity. This occurs, for instance, in the assertion of
competition over co-operation, of the public over private life, and of the positive
evaluation of the big and fast over the small and calm. This masculinisation of the
culture present in many institutions forces men and women to adapt to, and accept to be
governed by, values that may not always be their own human choice, resulting in
different sorts of social harm, interpersonal conflict and victimisation (ranging from
stress-related health problems to sexual harassment and mobbing).

The Group believes that these priorities reflect an organisation of society which no
longer corresponds to the wishes and needs of most people. Private, family, work and
public life are intertwined. It is interesting to notice that in some countries offering non-
transferable leave for fathers, men are taking this leave in large numbers. This indicates
that in the future, not only women but also men might give an increasing importance to
private and family life as compared to work life. Furthermore, employers might also
recognise that it is in their best interest to take account of a broader segment of life in
organising the work sphere.

c) New approaches

i. Family-friendly organisation of work

To explore this possibility, the Group commissioned Nina Amble of the Work Research
Institute, Norway, with a survey of activities to promote family-friendly enterprises in
Europe. She found a number of interesting cases of formal and/or informal flexibility
arrived at by collective negotiation or within a framework permitting individual
agreements on a monthly, weekly or daily basis, depending on individual (changing)
needs. In the past, there has been concern that flexibility would increase the pressure on
employees to adjust to employers’ demands, and this remains a very real concern. At the
same time, it now seems that socially acceptable standards for family-friendly policies
based on gender equality are emerging and becoming codified, while some regional or
local authorities award annual prizes to a family-friendly enterprise.

There is also a growing recognition of the value of a leave of absence when family or
private needs become pressing, for the employer as well as for the employee. Statutory
leave arrangements usually refer only to parental leave, but there are recent efforts to
widen this category, so that an employee can take medical leave or compassionate leave
to care for an elderly parent or a sibling. The European Union Parental Leave Directive
requires member countries to provide a legal right to time off for family emergencies.
Multinational companies such as IBM, AT&T and Xerox have even extended their leave
of absence arrangements to include different kinds of personal leave programmes,
offering employees company-paid benefits and guaranteed positions upon returning.
Another approach is the “life-cycle assistance” package or the family care package
including both a certain sum value of benefits and the possibility of leave, available
when the employee chooses to use them. With such programmes, enterprises – as well
as the public sector to an increasing extent – are recognising the impact of demographic
change: more and more highly qualified and valuable employees will find themselves

31
unexpectedly confronted with the need to care for the older generation, a situation
typically not planned for. The biological tie that so often seems to justify the young
mother taking on the care of an infant, has no exclusive gender for the adult child of an
ageing parent: this situation can affect an employee of either sex.

To the extent that men as well as women take on responsibilities at home, employers
will no longer be able to assume that men do not have families and are continuously
available to be physically present for long hours. A recent study of 2,500 business
administration candidates in 11 industrial countries concludes that there is a significant
tendency to seek a balance between family and work; six out of ten students put this
balance as their priority number one. In the future, enterprises will need to anticipate the
demand for a satisfying combination of family and work among qualified employees
without regard to gender. This is a challenge in terms of competitive advantage – to
attract and keep the best qualified personnel.

But it is also a potential for the workplace. Without the housewife to take care of the
(male) workers practical and emotional needs, both women and men are forced to find a
fruitful combination of private life, work and public democratic participation. As a
result, employees represent a broader spectrum of experience, feelings, attitudes and
perspectives. Employers able to see the potential value of diversity within their
workforce will have the advantage in productivity, creativity, and stability.

ii. Changing organisational culture

An approach which might be helpful in shifting the focus on private and public life
could be giving attention to organisational culture, since culture is the heritage not only
of individuals but also of organisations. In this context, gender can be understood as the
sociocultural space within which the relationships between domination and
subordination, the struggle for hegemony and the guidelines for resistance are situated
in the interaction between men and women.

Organisations incorporate value systems which impose the preferential pursuit of certain
goals over others. A particular culture is equivalent to a distinctly shared, defined and
differentiated value system pursued by the organisation in its activities. It is important to
point out that as far as building a culture of equality is concerned, long-term success
will not be guaranteed if the organisation considered does not first lay down roots in a
value system which reflects gender equilibrium. This is valid for small groups such as
families, communities or neighbourhoods, as well as for companies, sports associations,
and NGOs, and for larger groups such as government authorities, armies or nations.

Any organisation thus needs to reflect on its understanding of the values that foster
gender equality. The gender of an organisation will be the result of the values
predominating therein as expressed in its internal dynamics. We must seek corporate
cultures which bring with them a new cultural paradigm where feminine values and
attitudes counteract the consequences of the male model; over time, this can help
dissolve the association between values and gender which contributes so much to
stereotyping. It should not be forgotten that culture (in the macro sense of the word) is
built on cultures (in the micro sense). It is here that corporate action plays a basic social
role. On issues such as the work-family relationship, social responsibility and the rights
to mother/fatherhood, gender equality can be assured and fostered by organisations.

32
This is not just a desirable situation but a necessary alternative for the sustainability of
our society.

Equity relations within organisations, to the extent that they project and construct
corporate culture, shape institutional gender. Culturally and socially speaking,
organisations have a gender. Just as corporate culture can and should be evaluated, and
this is in fact a business priority of the highest order, the gender of public organisations
should also be evaluated and considered when establishing policies that configure
spaces of justice, liberty, excellence and security. In public organisations these policies
are of capital importance not only for the very equity they embrace but also for the
effect of spreading it into the culture of society in general.

Thus, it is particularly relevant to focus on policies tending to attain greater gender

equity in public institutions from two perspectives:

a) job motivation, in order to identify a culture which motivates personal service to

society (the public sphere) from work and family life (the private) without
harming it, and

b) job satisfaction, oriented to the idea that what the person values about his/her job
is how he/she is regarded by those being served (the public) rather than those
working within (internal hierarchical structure).

Concrete measures for implementing such policies could be:

a) establishing appropriate mechanisms for internal promotion based on criteria for

maximising equity at the widest possible focus level, and

b) designing the necessary internal practices and uses to facilitate an equilibrium

between work and family life depending on each person's variable situation,
conditions and age (people first policy).

iii. Interactions of organisational culture, flexibility and diversity

Overall, future work in the field should aim to transform the focus on the work-family
relations by addressing the more profound and difficult issues in the deep-rooted
organisational attitudes and the cultural norms and by identifying unintended negative
consequences of existing policies. The subject of reconciling work and family life
should therefore be moved from the periphery to the core of organisations/enterprises’
policy-making, and become an integral part of economic or other overall objectives.

This would mean that instead of focusing on strategies primarily designed to enable
women and mothers to adjust their family responsibilities to paid work, the main
question should be: which strategies can enable employees to bring their whole selves to
the job, their skills, experience, values and attitudes? Workforce diversity should be
seen as an advantage instead of an organisational problem. Employees who can bring
their whole person into the workplace and be “psychologically available” will be more
productive workers. Based on this philosophy, flexibility will no longer be seen as a
simple question of arranging time, but will be integrated into an approach of valuing
difference. In the long run, not only will the organisational culture change, but

33
 employers will also gain by letting their employees combine harmoniously the different
dimensions of their life.

Such a shift in focus, placing private/family life on an equal footing with professional
life, would create synergy within the work sphere, replacing non-productive conflicts;
the overall result promises to be beneficial to the employers and organisations as well as
to the employees (a win-win strategy). At the same time, it would reduce the competing
interests of women and men, and make easier the power negotiations within the family.
Child care would be seen as a right for children instead of being a problem to solve in
order to enable women and men to work.1

1
In the drafting of this chapter, the Group made extensive use of the study “New contributions and
efforts to promote family friendly enterprises in Europe” by Ms Nina AMBLE.

34
4. MEDIA AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
To assess what is at stake in the media sector, it is useful to make a clear distinction
between “information”, “communication” and “opinion”. Information refers to the
presentation of positive elements of a factual nature (for example, events, institutional
structures, legal norms). Communication refers to the rhetorical means used to present
this information. Opinion refers to comments, explanations, value judgements and
proposals for action. These distinctions can be helpful in avoiding some of the
misunderstandings that have blocked international discussion of equality strategies
relative to media influence.

It is well known that the media and information technology will be more and more
closely interrelated. For the present context, however, it is more important to stress the
distinction between the two in order to have a clear understanding of how exactly they
interact and what consequences result from their intermeshing. International discussion
has been dominated by a tendency to treat the two sectors of media and information
technology according to some notion of a “complementary” relationship. There are two
major errors emerging from such thinking:

• The new information technologies are often seen as just another component of the
media, another way to communicate. This leads to the fallacy of underestimating the
role that information technology has played over the last two centuries in the
evolution and organisation of industrial work.

• On the other hand, information technology is often seen as just a part of economic
evolution towards the “service sector”. This leads to the symmetrical fallacy of
forgetting the opportunities that these technologies give, and failing to observe
which actors gain new opportunities, under what circumstances, and which do not.

a) What has been achieved?

Awareness of gender issues has made considerable advances both in the media
themselves and in international discussion. For example, publications of the United
Nations and the Council of Europe have discussed:

• images of women in the media;

• issues and problems concerning under-representation of women in the media,
specifically in decision-making;
• biased description of violence and/or victimisation affecting women in the media;

With respect to information technology, it is clear that new risks and new opportunities
are emerging, new with respect to their gender-related potential as well. Whereas in the
past technological advances have often appeared as a masculine domain, today most
women work in information-intensive sectors and are able to make creative use of the
equipment and procedures; gender barriers are becoming more permeable.

Over the past century, women have acquired a solid understanding of what phone
communication does permit. They will develop their use of communication at present
speed, and in that sense are well prepared for the next century, because they are

35
 accustomed to devoting all the necessary time to putting data in usable form and have
skills in managing and manipulating files, for example, formatting and indexing.
Already, the presently available forms of networking and exchanging information allow
for a broader dialogue among women of different regions and countries at low cost; in
the past, only women who could afford to travel frequently could participate actively in
such interchange. At the same time, these forms open up easy access to dialogue across
gender lines, and can thus encourage alliances.

b) Where are the blockages?

There is a real need for better education of the public and of policy-making agencies on
the use of the media. Some of the larger scale problems are:

• a growing gap between professed belief in the independence of the press and the
daily practice of programming, whereby the presentation of information depends on
a quantified measurement of relative public audience attention. The numbers of
households watching programmes or purchasing a product is a poor indicator for
such human rights issues as gender equality;

• growing doubts in the public about the autonomy of the media writers from their
financing stakeholders. These doubts are sometimes excessive; but it is a well-
known fact that in many poorly managed media, programme criteria depend more
and more on marketing, not even on economic logic;

• growing instability of presented and accepted information, for reasons that are not
related to the economic concentration of the media industry. Small information
teams, such as those representing the NGOs, can have a huge impact on event-
making information, while the traditional opinion press is more and more unable to
scrutinise and confront the information.

It is clear that there are significant inequalities of access to the active use of information
technology, and these relate to other societal tensions. We are in danger of a new
dualization among the “have” and the “have-not”, the “connected” and the “not
connected”. Indeed, it would be a serious error to assume that Internet will constitute
spontaneously a new democratic arena; this possibility requires active educational, but
also technical initiatives which are consciously directed at overcoming barriers and
stimulating participation. Until now there has been a dominant tendency towards
laissez-faire, as if access to the most influential communication system of the future
were a matter only of personal taste and disposable income.

Expanding participation in this information network encounters well-known blockages:

• cost of investment in equipment and educational programmes;

• in general, boys use computers more than girls at school; there is also a tendency to
provide computer programmes and video games intended for boys rather than girls;
• weak interest of many women in so-called new technologies. At least with
prevailing educational methods, most women prefer practical uses to hazard
exploration when confronted with new technical devices;

36
 • over-masculine dressing of present technology and uses. As has been aptly said, a
“real” computer has to be ugly and full of pin-up pictures and war games;
• existence of feminine ghettos of low-level machine servants (encoding, typing)
with well-known effects: job instability, overflexibility of time schedule, poor use of
the possibilities of teleworking (often only a term for home work),
overspecialisation, which often means dequalification;
• chaotic state of information related to social matters, to the effect that accounting
clerks may be better informed about the national economy than would-be experts.
Strategic action is needed concerning the introduction of librarians-documentalists
(another women-populated profession) on the Internet;
• lack of interest in improving the quality of life of older people, particularly of
women, inasmuch as it concerns the investment to facilitate their access to new
technologies in later life.

c) New approaches

i. Democratic control of negative stereotyping in advertising

Freedom of expression is not a privilege of the press, but a fundamental right of all
citizens; the press in all its forms is an important indicator of citizens’ freedom of
speech and thought, and itself a vehicle for its growth and full use. At the same time,
the press has also become profoundly intertwined with advertising, which, in itself, is
essentially an economic activity in the market economy, quite different from the
expression of opinions or the public debate of issues. The need to regulate advertising
has been long recognised in democracies, for example, to protect customers from
patently untruthful claims, to protect their personal rights or for other reasons.
Regulating advertising may indeed protect the freedom of the press.

Thus, there is no sense in confusing freedom of the press with “autoregulation” (or
“internal jurisdiction”) advocated by some within the advertising industry. Three
sources of norms are conceivable for this branch of activity, namely:

• external norms and/or incentives by public authorities;

• internal ethical committees for autoregulation;
• customer mobilisation setting limits to advertising that offends significant numbers
of people, as has been employed with respect to sexist presentations.

Within this ethical landscape, various combinations, depending to some extent on local
traditions and sensitivities, but also on pragmatic considerations, have been brought into
play with the goal of setting limits to the reinforcement of gender inequality and the
exploitation of sexual violence in advertising, but also encouraging sales strategies that
“put their money on” the desire for a more gender-equal world.

ii. Social responsibility of the media

More imaginative strategies may be required to ensure that the media present the
information that is needed to shape a more diverse and equal future; these might try to
go boldly where no gender programme has gone, taking cues from the evolution of such
domains as public health and the environment. In these domains, established only after

37
some struggle with established thinking, it is now accepted that it can be the obligation
of service industries to serve the essential needs of the great majority of the population,
and to do so without discrimination and according to principles of social justice. By
analogy, we could envisage the formulation of new criteria of legitimacy for making
information available, proceeding from the recognition that good and clean information
is as essential to the well-being and social participation of the population as clean water
and clean air. Criteria might involve the number of people who are concerned by the
problematic to which information relates; and the visibility that should be given to
relevant items by reason of their democratically defined relative importance.

Starting from this point of view, it would be easier to envisage such traditional goals as

• trying to raise the gender consciousness of the decision-makers in the information

industry (men and women);
• trying to raise the consumer consciousness of women and their collective power;
• designing more explicit regulation codes for the media content.

News reporters have a well-known tendency to accept a drama-like approach to

information, related to an event-like presentation of social developments. Such
presentation of information inevitably loses an important part of the actual significance,
as it is only received by the public in a piecemeal way: pathetic events that are loosely
related to their context. The use of “expert” consultation by the media, more often than
not leads, paradoxically, to a greater deformation of the necessary context (economical,
political, historical, cultural). Gender issues are markedly more processual, less event-
like than standard political issues. Particular attention thus has to be devoted to their
treatment, if the information is to be accurate or useful.

Indeed, we do not need any dirigist conception of information policy in order to think
about:

• designing various incentives for a more diverse presentation of information in the

wide audience media;
• encouraging a systematic appeal to a more public practice of the critical discussion
that is a characteristic of modern intellectual investigation. Ours is a tradition open
to questioning;
• correcting the abuse of the “consecration by experts”: calling more or less
specifically competent people in order to have them pronounce some decisive
declaration on concrete matters is for them an excessive challenge; for the media a
poor practice of information management; and for the public a sure path to general
scepticism and indifference;
• reformulating questions relevant to information deontology, professional training,
unstable career planning, generalisation of free-lance jobs, star-system, etc.

iii. Using the potential of information technology

New approaches to information technology will need to focus on access, decision-

making and dissemination. With respect to their deployment in the organisation of work,
equality strategies must secure the participation of both women and men to preclude
continuing tendencies towards cheap labour use, where the new skills (text processing,

38
databases feeding and usage) will be as caricatural as the training of a telephone
operator. Participation requires knowledge and self-confidence, which are often lacking;
women have been all too willing to leave the strategic use of computers to men. There is
a need to inform and raise the awareness of women about their strong positions in the
field of information technologies.

• They have more often than not a strong education in language use whatever their
level of schooling;
• They are used to speaking about what they can practically do in a given professional
environment, according to their past experience;
• Women in qualified professions have proven very able to use information
technologies;
• The relative anonymity of the Internet allows for gender-free experiences (always
partial, but instructive);
• A large number of gender-conscious persons in relevant professions (librarians,
computer scientists, psychologists, managers in human resources, civil servants,
etc.) are able to discuss and solve ergonomic and content problems.

These considerations give cause to question the widespread assumption that computers
are a masculine domain. Although present statistics show that, in a global view, the vast
majority of personal computers are owned by white North American men, the reality is
more complex. Because of the speed with which information is processed, even
marginal and occasional access, if the computer is used as an instrument and not as a
toy, can be significant. Some factors suggest that developments may favour equality
strategies:

• there are signs of a “leap-frog” effect, whereby countries or groups that have lagged
behind move ahead by going directly to the newest technology;
• more and more work environments include Internet access, and only marginal time
segments are needed to use it for multiple purposes, i.e. networking can “piggy-
back”;
• wide-reaching and transnational networks can be built rapidly even when only one
person in a segment of society has access to the Internet, but relays information to
local or face-to-face circles;
• electronic communication is soon becoming the least costly of all forms of long-
distance exchange as far as a single communication is concerned;
• there is already experience with using the Internet for political lobbying without
having to invest in offices or staff.

All of this suggests that ensuring (shared) access to electronic communication can be an
important strategy for change. In many countries, publicly funded programmes, but also
private enterprise donations, have been set up to provide schools with computers. This
approach could be transferred to equality policy. The rapid evolution of hardware is
producing an enormous excess of products that are no longer needed on the previous
site, but can well be used to process text and connect to the Internet, there are even
growing problems of disposing of the “waste”. NGOs and community agencies with a
gender equality commitment should be provided with basic equipment and training to
participate in transnational communication, drawing on the talents and skills of women
to develop simple and effective network procedures. The popular European city and

39
community partnerships might be a framework for dissemination, as well as a
programme of “adoption” of organisations in economically weak areas by “sister
organisations” in countries relatively rich in technological equipment.

40
 PART III

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES

In seeking to define priorities, aims, strategies, tools and working methods for future activities
in the field of equality, the Group gave close attention to the actual process by which
awareness is raised, men are encouraged to participate and young people fully integrated into
the process of achievement of equality.

Awareness-raising is not a tool in the sense that mainstreaming is1, but a dynamic process
throughout society. Research has shown that resistance and/or ambivalence towards equality
can result from the fact that gender relations and personal identity are intertwined. Individuals
live in networks of personal relationships which depend on mutual acceptance of each other
as members of a culture, of a gender or of a social group. Change in the understanding of
identities proceeds through changing the material practices of daily social interaction and
daily life. Thus, raising awareness and mobilising an active interest in equality must be
eminently practical, in terms of its implications of living together in a shared social reality.

Although it is evidently true that a more just and equal society promises a richer and a better
life to all its members, gender inequality as it now exists privileges men. Recent research
makes it clear that there are many contradictions within masculinity, from which men suffer,
for example with damaging consequences for their health. At the same time, the great
majority of men find it to their short-term advantage not to question or challenge the
dominance of the masculine ideal. Therefore, inclusionary strategies will always have to
proceed by building specific alliances based not on gender alone, but also on other ideals and
concerns that men can more easily share with women.

Reflecting on the results of the questionnaire distributed to young people from a number of
European countries, the Group was struck by the extent to which gender equality was
presumed to be solely concerned with women’s advancement in the workplace. The
institutionalisation of equality policy seems to have led to a perception of this as a single
issue, competing with other issues, many of which young people may feel to be closer to their
own concerns. Their lack of involvement in pursuing gender equality thus may be part of a
widespread disaffection of young people with politics overall, currently a serious concern of
democracy. Full integration of young people into the debate on equality requires broadening
the range of issues that are discussed with a gender perspective and relating these in an active
way to their needs and aspirations. Gender mainstreaming may prove to be an important tool
for this, but it must be accompanied by increased dialogue between established organisations
and new local initiatives and activities.

In the course of its work the Group has discovered that in the different European countries,
much energy and imagination is being devoted to strategies which include some or all of the
above elements. Future priorities and working methods can be developed from an intelligent
1
See EG-S-MS (98) 2 – Final report of activities of the Council of Europe’s Group of specialists on
gender mainstreaming.

41
transfer of successful approaches in one area or location to another problem or context. To
facilitate this the Group has tried to identify strategic considerations that have guided effective
local strategies and that might be useful in developing new ones.

• It is important for strategies to reflect on the impact they have both on women and men
and to find ways of addressing the specific responsibilities and vulnerabilities of both
groups within a field of action. This may, for example, involve developing distinct, but co-
operating projects corresponding to the involvement of each gender.

• The conceptual framework of successful strategies is flexible with respect to the needs
and situations of individuals and groups and to the circumstances at each particular
location. For example, rather than making a decision of principle in favour of single-sex
or of mixed-sex groups, the implementation of forward-looking strategies may employ
one or the other, depending on resources and immediate goals, and respecting the feelings
and needs of both female and male participants.

• Strategies which empower women and men avoid setting them against each other in an
either/or relationship. There are many ways of being a woman or of being a man and
progress towards equality must include increasing openness for this variety. Thus,
strategies will not suggest that women are “better” than men but instead will highlight the
value of diversity for organisations and for society.

• With regard to organisational change, it is vital to win a maximum of co-operation and

motivation among those who are to carry out procedures. For this, it has been shown that a
decision-making process which works towards consensus and is based on broad
participation is more productive than confrontation or the deployment of hierarchy. A shift
in values towards what has traditionally been seen as “feminine” may help organisations
to meet the demands of the future.

• There are numerous local activities and projects which demonstrate a comprehensive and
highly differentiated understanding of gender equality. These often struggle with a lack of
resources and support. Such strategies have a great potential for raising awareness because
they show that, in all fields of life, every policy and every measure of action can either
reinforce or transform gender relations. Gender defines the social identity of individuals
as well as permeating our culture.

• Issues of gender equality have often been reduced to negotiating the power imbalance
between women and men. Effective strategies can communicate the message that equality
benefits children, for example by widening the field of options for their own personality
and future, as well as by potentially doubling the number of adults who can be responsible
for their care.

• Effective methods for bringing about change will focus neither on the isolated individual
nor on the society as a whole, but take into account the intermediate level: organisations,
social networks, communities and families.

• Successful strategies link gender equality with other issues of democracy, with future
priorities and values, with human rights, health and substantive justice.

42
• Effective strategies create a basis for rethinking divisions traditionally made between the
private and the public sphere, and highlight the implications of equality in personal life for
the quality of life of everyone in society.

43
 PART IV

ASSESSING MECHANISMS FOR IMPLEMENTING

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES

INTRODUCTION
The interest in new strategies and approaches should not be construed as meaning that
legal instruments have run their course. Indeed, because of the time required for them to
have an effect, the need for continuity cannot be emphasised too much. In its task of
evaluating existing equality policies, the Group decided to look more closely at the
options for enforcing anti-discrimination strategies and consider whether they have been
employed to their full potential.

By “enforcement”, we mean that there is a recognised sanction for failure to observe the
principle of equality or non-discrimination. This is most commonly laid down by law,
though parallel extralegal means of enforcement can be provided via internal rules of
undertakings, such as complaints or disputes procedures. Even if non-legal methods of
enforcement are common, however, as in the employment sphere in countries with a
strong tradition of joint regulation by management and employee representatives, it is
widely acknowledged that the right not to be discriminated against needs to be rooted in
law.

a) What has been achieved?

Any assessment of what has been achieved largely depends upon the time frame chosen.
For most European countries, the status of women has been transformed in the period
since the second world war, with women's participation in paid employment becoming
the norm rather than the exception.

This has been accompanied in all member countries by legislation which prohibits
discrimination on grounds of sex. The scope of the prohibition, however, varies from
country to country, from a general, and largely symbolic, constitutional statement that
men and women should be treated equally to detailed legal codes prohibiting sex
discrimination in employment, education, housing and the provision of goods, facilities
and services.

We note some blockages to further progress below; however, it is right that we should
also make clear that, taking a medium- to long-term perspective and comparing the
position today with that 30 or 40 years ago, a great deal has been achieved in terms of
conferring concrete legal rights to sex equality. This is particularly the case in the
employment area, for that is where women's status has been transformed. Thus, most, if
not all, member countries will have enacted legislation on:

• equal pay for equal work or work of equal value

44
 • a right not to be discriminated against in recruitment, selection, promotion and
working conditions
• a right not to be discriminated against on pregnancy grounds
• a right to maternity leave and to return to work
• prohibition of sexual harassment at work
• prohibition of discrimination on grounds of marital or family status
• equal retirement ages and, in some countries, equal pensions.

Indirect discrimination – policies or practices having an adverse impact upon one

gender – is less often regulated. However, within countries adhering to European Union
law (the members of the EU itself, the members of EFTA, and candidates or prospective
candidates for EU membership who have adopted a policy of social convergence),
indirect discrimination in pay and conditions, and in social security benefits, must be
prohibited unless objectively justified.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that women and men are not treated equally and that
barriers remain.

b) What are the blockages?

If a right is incapable of enforcement, it is unlikely to be much of a right at all. In most

Council of Europe member countries, the law has not failed as a strategy to promote
equality between women and men. It has barely been used at all. Most countries have
little experience of women regularly using the law to enforce their legal rights and to
obtain a remedy against discrimination. Several obstacles can be distinguished here.

i. Access to justice

Sex discrimination law will not be used if the cost of bringing a complaint is seen as
disproportionate to the benefits to be derived.

By costs, we mean both direct legal costs – lawyers' fees, court fees – and indirect costs
such as the time involved to prepare and participate in a case. In many countries, the
law is primarily for the benefit of the middle class – those who can afford it.

Access to justice is deterred by the cost of securing it. This can be addressed by
providing government funding for litigation through a legal aid system, whereby the
costs of the case are met by the taxpayer, or by Government or privately-funded law
clinics and advice centres which provide free assistance to potential claimants, or by the
provision of free advice from lawyers on a voluntary basis (pro bono work).

Access to justice is deterred by lengthy procedures. Two cases in the European Court of
Justice in recent years – Enderby, an equal pay case from the United Kingdom, and
Thibault, a pregnancy discrimination case from France – had been running over 10
years when the Court of Justice gave its ruling. Justice delayed is justice denied, a
principle recognised by the European Court of Human Rights.

Access to justice is deterred by legislation which is drafted in terms which are

incomprehensible to ordinary men and women. This serves as a job creation device for

45
lawyers, but is inimical to achieving change. People should be able to know their legal
rights – and their legal obligations – without referring to a lawyer.

ii. Obstacles to an anti-discrimination consensus

Strategies for achieving equality between the sexes will only succeed if they are
supported by a broad section of the population. This means that they must be supported
by, or at least not opposed by, a significant proportion of men. If “equality” is seen as
benefiting women only, it is unlikely to secure sufficient political support for effective
strategies to be adopted, and measures which are adopted will be less easy to enforce. In
many cases, the public debate calling for measures to overcome discrimination soon
shifted into a debate on measures “for women” and – explicitly or implicitly – “against
men”. In some countries the proponents of legislative measures have argued that men
will “of course” oppose these because they want to defend their privileges. Once the
problem has been framed in these terms, the temptation seems to be very strong to
overgeneralise criticism of men as a group, in order to justify measures against them.
This is a strategy bound to backfire at some point.

It can also lead to discrimination against men, undermining principles of social justice
on which important alliances between women and men in the struggle for equality have
been based. If real concern about sexual abuse is generalised to assume that all men are
potential abusers, men may be excluded – by customer pressure if nothing else – from
jobs in day-care centres, and even in primary school teaching. Such consequences of
stereotyping block, for example, efforts to encourage men to develop nurturing and
caring skills, sometimes amounting to a double-bind, where men are criticised for
avoiding caring activities, but defined as dangerous if they choose to do them. A similar
stereotyping was evident in the recent depiction by the media (and some European
politicians) of Viagra as a “sex drug” for ”dirty old men”, rather than as a treatment for
a problem seriously affecting the emotional well-being of many men (and couples).

The Treaty of Amsterdam authorises positive action in favour both of women and of
men, where they are underrepresented, by providing: “With a view to ensuring full
equality in practice between men and women in working life, the principle of equal
treatment shall not prevent any Member State from maintaining or adopting measures
providing for specific advantages in order to make it easier for the underrepresented sex
to pursue a vocational activity or to prevent or compensate for disadvantages in
professional careers.” Future equality policy will need to consider how the call for
proactive measures to overcome collective injustice can best be reconciled with the
individual right to non-discrimination.

iii. Hesitance to employ dissuasive penalties effectively

It must be recognised that not discriminating often exacts a cost. Customers or clients
may prefer to deal with men rather than women. Introducing women in previously sex-
segregated jobs may engender resentment from men. Developing and maintaining
systems which aim to ensure that discrimination does not take place costs money in
terms of management time. Developing and maintaining systems which ensure that
services are provided which result in substantive as well as formal equality also costs
money.

46
 It is obvious that many actors will be tempted to avoid the cost of not discriminating,
unless the cost of discriminating is even greater. That is why effective and dissuasive
sanctions are central to any equality strategy.

Yet, in the majority of member countries of the Council of Europe, sanctions for
infringing the principle of non-discrimination are inadequate, in that the penalties
imposed on the discriminator are not sufficiently great to serve as a deterrent.

There is a further negative dimension to inadequate sanctions of central importance.

Unless remedies are seen as worthwhile, those who are discriminated against on
grounds of sex will not use the law to obtain redress.

c) New or insufficiently tried approaches

There are a range of remedies for sex discrimination which have been used infrequently
in Europe and which have the potential for altering the balance between the cost of
discriminating and the cost of not discriminating.

These include:

• Class actions, whereby legal proceedings are taken in the name of a group of people
claiming to have been discriminated against in the same way, avoiding the need for
each individual to bring separate proceedings.

• Contract compliance, whereby organisations dealing with the public sector are
required to ensure equal opportunities for women and men within their own
organisations or risk losing commercial contracts to provide goods or services to the
public sector contractor.

• Use of the tax system to provide disincentives to organisations found to have

discriminated unlawfully on grounds of sex, or incentives to organisations not to
discriminate. This is a technique commonly adopted in areas such as the
environmental policies, but is virtually unknown in social policy.

• Sanctions against individual discriminators by making them personally liable for

discrimination, even when acting on behalf of their employer.

Attention has recently shifted from strategies for enforcing equality to proactive
policies, encouraging organisations to take steps themselves to ensure that they do not
discriminate on grounds of sex.

• Equality audits are a technique whereby an organisation vets its policies and
practices to determine whether they have an adverse impact according to gender
and, if so, whether the organisation considers that the policy or practice is
nonetheless objectively justified. It has been suggested that legislation might make
periodic equality audits compulsory in organisations above a minimum size.

• Equality plans may be developed where the organisation has itself identified
aspects or areas where equality of opportunity is not being afforded. For example,
occupations where women are underrepresented or unexplained differences in pay

47
 between jobs predominantly done by women and those predominantly done by men.
Equality plans are usually accompanied by targets, setting out a timetable for
achieving greater equality. It has been suggested that legislation might make equality
plans compulsory in organisations above a minimum size.

• Gender mainstreaming aims to ensure that the gender impact of decisions is taken
into account in the decision-making process. Since the United Nations Beijing
Conference, mainstreaming has become a central part of the equality strategy of the
Council of Europe and the European Union.

These examples of proactive policies are all commendable in principle. It remains to be

seen whether they are viable strategies in practice.

• Equality audits and equality plans, insofar as they relate to sex equality, have been
voluntary in most European countries rather than compulsory. Effective enforcement
would appear to require establishing extensive reporting requirements and
monitoring systems.

• It is unclear how gender mainstreaming will relate to other considerations which

decision-makers are asked to take into account - viz. the effect of the decision on
ethnic and racial minorities, disabled people, gays and lesbians, the elderly, the poor,
small and medium-sized businesses, the environment –, how this will impact upon
the decision-making process in practice, and how any conflicts of interest are to be
resolved.

• It may prove difficult to convince governments, faced with budgetary constrictions,

that short-term economic efficiency, awarding contracts to organisations that put in
the lowest bid without considering gender impact, may be more costly in the long
run, and run counter to fundamental values of a democratic society.

48
49
 PART V

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

When surveying examples of good practice in specific areas, the Group pursued the idea of
“cross-fertilisation”, the fruitful potential transfer of methods and strategies across sectors of
political efforts, looked for common elements which contribute to their success and tried to
identify needs with reference to strengthening, linking and reinforcing activities already
existing. The recommendations are derived from this examination.

Gender equality is an attainable goal, and one towards which the majority of people will be
willing to move, because they can experience substantial changes within one generation,
changes that enrich their lives and correspond to the wish for social justice. The desire to
experience positive progress can, however, only become effective if the human fear of
uncertain or threatening aspects of change can be reassured or overcome. Both aspects – the
promise of a better society and the apprehensions of negative impact – must be taken account
of in future strategies. It is precisely because the social and cultural transformation of
realising equality is wide and deep that it cannot be effected by short-term measures; it calls
for a “long haul” and not a “quick fix”.

There is a clear need to promote continuity in the work towards equality, to counteract the
“fashion trend” approach which the Group found in some cases. Many working methods and
strategies have not been recognised as effective solely because they have not been put to
continued, consistent use. Some have been much talked about but seldom actually employed.
It is particularly unproductive to drop approaches and cancel projects of one design, and begin
entirely different activities after a gap in time. Gender equality is indivisible, it is not to be
attained in bits and pieces.

Including men, involving young people, addressing gender relations rather than competing
claims of groups, awakening new enthusiasm for the work of attaining equality – these are all
most likely to succeed when policies and strategies build sequentially on a step-by-step basis,
putting one strategic element firmly into place and then going on to add another.

The Group strongly recommends that the member States take action to secure
such continuity, assisted by partnerships with NGOs and local initiatives.

The law is basic to democracy and equality, but it is not always the most effective instrument
for changing attitudes or behaviour. Some legal strategies are more successful than others.
Compulsory seat belts in cars has been widely successful; prohibition of marijuana less so. A
cross-cultural, interdisciplinary legal study of what makes laws work in Europe might prove
of great benefit in helping to shape future equality strategies.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe considers carrying out research

into the factors that have determined whether equal opportunities legislation
works successfully in member countries.

50
Dissatisfaction with legal procedures as a means of dealing with complex situations and
interpersonal conflicts has led to growing interest in alternative dispute resolution (ADR).
This entails the use of third parties for conciliation, mediation or arbitration of a dispute. This
is particularly appropriate in the case of sex discrimination complaints, because these often
involve situations in which it is in the interests of all parties to preserve their relationship if
practicable, while resolving the dispute: e.g. disputes between employer and employee, or
between doctor and patient. ADR may be able to avoid the ill-feeling engendered by law suits.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe considers investigating means of

improving access to justice in the field of equality between women and men,
including the use of alternative dispute resolution.

Many expectations and doubts about the efficacy of legal measures towards achieving
equality lead to the question of the consequences when proclaimed norms are not, in fact,
fulfilled. There has been insufficient study of this, especially under the comparative aspect
which might be suggestive when weighing alternative strategies.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe, by means of an interdisciplinary

group, should explore the possibility of developing more effective remedies and
sanctions for the infringement of the principle of equal treatment between
women and men.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe carry out case studies on how
equality auditing, equality plans and mainstreaming are working in practice.

Surveys of innovative practice in specific areas regularly conclude that there is a great need
for networking interchange of experience and knowledge about related activities in other
locations even within countries. Projects and initiatives generally see such contact and
interaction as a source of energy and a stimulus to develop their methods further.

The Group recommends developing active support for sectorial networking

among organisations – such as schools in education or hospitals in health –
which initiate projects or organisational policies to work towards gender
equality.

By the same token, there is a need to create databases on innovative practices in each area.

As an exemplary initiative, it is recommended that the competent bodies of the

Council of Europe (European Health Committee and/or the CDEG) create a
database on projects whereby institutions of the health system respond to
gender-based violence with sensitivity and specific competence.

In order to meet the need for availability of experience in a variety of areas, the Group further
suggests that it would be possible, with some quite modest financial and/or technical support,
to enable innovation-friendly organisations/towns to create and maintain a Website for its
specific area of practice on the Internet. Such a dynamic database would make it possible to
monitor and evaluate the development of strategies and methods in the given area.

51
 The competent bodies of the Council of Europe and the member States should
be encouraged to identify suitable organisations and support them in
establishing such sites.

In many cases, local organisations such as women's health centres, schools, or even police
lack the equipment to use the Internet as a source of information and interchange. A flanking
measure to the creation of a Website might be to offer organisations a workstation with
modem as an “award” for developing an organisational strategy towards equality. This would
have the double impact of advancing networking and creating an incentive for initiating
change. Organisations, like human beings, learn most effectively through incentives.

In the area covered by the states that are members or observers of the Council of Europe there is
a present need for a communication medium, which might take the form of a women’s
newsletter (paper and/or electronic). The wide variety of social traditions throughout this area is
not an obstacle to this suggestion; on the contrary, it urgently calls for it.

The CDEG should consider carrying out a feasibility study for a newsletter (paper
and/or electronic) on good practice for gender equality, giving consideration to
possible organisational and material resources and an incremental strategy of
development.

A major hindrance to networking transnationally, as well as to the spread of good practice, are
language barriers. Innovation and positive approaches to change are – so the information
gathered by the Group suggests – typically driven by the motivation and enthusiasm of
practitioners seeking to make improvements within their own work environment. Exchange
of information among such initiatives would greatly increase their potential for continuing
their efforts, often with minimal resources.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe and the member States consider
ways of making translation services available for key information on national
websites, so that at least brief project descriptions can become accessible to
practitioners with similar ideas or needs in other countries, as far as possible in
their own languages.

Academic, policy-making, administrative, legislative and judiciary branches are confronted with
a flood of loosely coherent and partial textual information. This is more so in gender issues,
where global decisions, while necessary, have proved insufficient, while a wide, but not infinite
corpus of local or international discussions, jurisprudential traditions and other relevant
literature, have to be taken into account for almost any new initiative. There is need for a way to
treat this textual mesh as a loosely structured database. This is now feasible using such simple
computer tools as “full-text searching”, which implies that all useful literature is put in electronic
form, using textual markers.

The CDEG should launch a feasibility study for a “textual database” concerning
women’s issues on a Council of Europe scale, ie. a corpus of texts structured with
markers in a convenient way in order to make retrieval and quotation more
efficient and less time-consuming. This should include consideration of the
necessary and effective infrastructure to ensure continuous updating.

52
All suggestions for improving exchange of information will depend to a large extent on the
availability of electronic media on a broad basis to organisations and groups of all kinds
working for gender equality. Multi-level initiatives should be undertaken, using all of the
many structures of transnational co-operation and partnership that already exist as
frameworks for sponsoring between low- and higher-technology regions or NGOs,
community partnerships, or private enterprise donations of new or used technological
equipment. Particular efforts should be made towards increasing the effective access of
women’s NGOs to information technology, including training partnerships in the use of the
Internet.

It is recommended that the CDEG launch an effort towards a quick

dissemination of basic textual communication technologies, involving the co-
operation of all other competent bodies within the Council of Europe.

It is recommended that the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of

Europe (CLRAE) develop a programme of promoting access to information
technology for local equality offices and NGOs with a commitment to equality,
where appropriate on a time-sharing basis.

For the transformation to gender equality there must be support for positive approaches
relating to organisational culture. Gender equality projects and reflexivity and continuous
mentoring in order to raise awareness of the practitioners (e.g. teachers, doctors, police
officers) on whom the success of good practices depends. Real change is only possible when
the actors within an organisation are open to recognising and overcoming their own gender
preconceptions, stereotypes and habits.

The Group recommends that member States establish Resource Centres for
practical equality projects in each policy sector, whose role could be to collect
and make information available, publish useful material (e.g. summarising
cutting-edge research in a format accessible for practical application), as well as
mentoring, helping projects find outside speakers, etc. In many cases, existing
institutions/organisations could develop such a Resource Centre at relatively
low additional cost.

It is vital to support holistic approaches addressing gender relations and social justice, rather
than symptom-oriented practices targeting narrow goals (e.g. test performance, screening
examinations, beds in shelters). Statistics showing numerical inequality are a vital tool in
mainstreaming because they help locate problems, but neither the problem itself nor its
solution lies in such numbers; they are to be found in the relationships between women and
men, between the masculine and the feminine. There is a need for whole organisation
policies which expand the options within each gender group, eliminate the hierarchical and
unequal values and respect, and enable both sexes to respond to, value and utilise both fields
of competencies, styles of learning and acting and both cognitive, emotional and moral
languages that have, in the past, been gender-typical or gender-preferred.

It is suggested that the Council of Europe consider a series of seminars in

different sectors at which whole organisation policies are presented, their
experience discussed and documented.

53
 It is recommended that the member States commission research to evaluate and
document exemplary cases where organisations, agencies or institutions such as
schools, universities, hospitals or media have implemented holistic strategies
towards gender equality.

In many areas, the Group found it difficult to identify strategies and working methods that are
clearly successful in persuading young people to make a commitment or become involved in
working for gender equality. There are many opinions and explanations available as to why
this might be the case, but it would be of greater significance to uncover examples of
successful approaches.

Thus, in this regard, as a show piece in a matter where further study is needed, it is
recommended that the competent bodies of the Council of Europe (Education
Committee; Committee for the Development of Sport) commission quantitative,
sex-segregated research on access and space allocated to extra-curricular activities
in schools, such as sports. It is suggested that they request member States to report
on public expenditure supporting youth sports activities differentiated by sex.

The Council of Europe should consider commissioning more extensive “network

strategy search studies” of the type employed on a small scale by the Group for its
work, and in this context organising a sequence of “fora on the future” with
experts working with young people and representatives of different groups of
youth, in order to find ways of moving forward in this area.

A central concern of experts both within the group and among those consulted in the course of
network strategy searches was the low level of integration of existing knowledge on causes of
gender inequality, factors that influence its persistence and possibilities of bringing about change
into professional training in the relevant academic fields. In particular, there seems to be far too
little preparation of teachers and school administration personnel to understand and address
gender equality as a core responsibility of public education.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe, by means of a

joint/interdisciplinary group of experts on education and equality between
women and men, explore the development of guidelines, adaptable to the
diverse conditions in the member States, for the integration of the goal of gender
equality and the methods of working towards it into teachers’ education/training.

54
55
 APPENDIX A

MEMBERS OF THE GROUP OF SPECIALISTS

The Group of Specialists was composed as follows:

Mme Annie DE WIEST (representative of the CDEG)
Directrice, Egalité des Chances, Ministère de la Communauté française, 44 Bd Léopold II, B­
1080 BRUXELLES

Mr Jean­Claude KAUFMANN (1st meeting of the Group)
12 rue de la République, F­22000 SAINT­BRIEUC

Professor Dr Carol HAGEMANN­WHITE (Vice­Chair)
Universität Osnabrück, D­49069 OSNABRÜCK

Mme Elisabeth KARDOS­KAPONYI (Chair)
Professeur de Droit, Université des Sciences Economiques de Budapest, Institut des Relations 
Internationales, 8 Fövam tér, H­1828 BUDAPEST

Ms Helene AARSETH (1st and 2nd meetings)
Equal Status Division, Ministry of Children and Family, Akersgt 59, N­0180 OSLO

Ms Sissel FROEBERG (4th meeting)
Ministry of Children and Family, Akersgt 59, N­0180 OSLO

Mr José PEREZ ADAN (as from 2nd meeting)
Departamento  de  Sociologia,  Universidad  de  Valencia,   Campus  de  Tarongers,  Avda.  de  los 
Naranjos s/n, E­46022 VALENCIA

Mr Michael RUBENSTEIN
Equal   Opportunities   Review,   Smithwood   House,   Smithwood   Common,   Cranleigh,   GB­
SURREY GU6 8QY

56
 APPENDIX B

TERMS OF REFERENCE

1. Name of Committee: Group of Specialists on future priorities, strategies and

working methods in the field of equality between women
and men (EG-S-FP)

2. Type of Committee: Group of Specialists

3. Source of terms of Steering Committee for Equality between women

reference: and men (CDEG)

4. Terms of reference:

i. in the light of developments which have taken place in European societies during
recent years, assess whether existing equality policies, strategies and working
methods employed to implement them, at all levels, are still suited to today's
circumstances;

ii. reflect on ways and means to overcome the ingrained attitudes and beliefs which
hamper the effective realisation of equality between women and men and limit
women's full enjoyment of human rights;

iii. in particular, describe and analyse awareness-raising as a tool to promote equality

and propose strategies and working methods in this field;

iv. reflect on the role of men in the promotion of equality between women and men
and on how to encourage their participation in the debate on the realisation of
equality between women and men;

v. study the needs and interests of young people with regard to equality between
women and men and the ways in which they can be fully integrated into the
debate on and the process of achievement of equality;

vi. on the basis of the results of the work under i., ii., iii, iv and v., define priorities,
aims, strategies, tools and working methods for future activities in the field of
equality between women and men and propose concrete actions and projects to
be undertaken by the Steering Committee for equality between women and men
(CDEG), other Steering Committees of the Council of Europe and in member
States.

In carrying out its terms of reference, the EG-S-FP should bear in mind the strategic
objectives outlined in the Beijing Platform for Action, and the work of the CDEG's Group of
Specialists on mainstreaming (EG-S-MS).

57
5. Composition:

The Group of Specialists shall be composed of 6 experts, 1 member of the CDEG

(Belgium) and 5 high-level independent experts who, besides possessing extensive
knowledge of the question of equality between women and men, are experts in e.g. the
following fields: law, culture, media, education, sociology, social/economic affairs,
women's studies. The cost of their participation shall be borne by the Council of Europe.
These specialists, at least two of whom should be men, shall be appointed by the
Secretariat pursuant to suggestions from CDEG members. The principle of geographical
balance shall be respected when nominating the experts.

6. Working methods:

In the framework of its terms of reference, the EG-S-FP may have contacts or
consultations with persons and/or organisations possessing specialist knowledge of the
subject under consideration. It can also call upon external consultants.

7. Duration of the terms of reference:

These terms of reference expire on 31 December 1998.

58
 APPENDIX C

QUESTIONNAIRE

ON FUTURE PRIORITIES FOR

EQUALITY BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN

The Council of Europe has set up a Group of specialists to think about how we can move
towards a future of equality between women and men. The Group is especially interested in
what young people think about this and would like your input. We would welcome your ideas
and answers to any or all of the questions below (if you need more space use the back of the
page).

1. How you think your country compares to others in Europe with respect to equality
between women and men?

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

2. Have you come across any situations where you think women or men have been
discriminated against on the basis of their sex? Yes ❏ No ❏
If so, what kind of situation was it?

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

3. Do you think women and men can work together towards equality?
If so, how? If not, why not?

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

59
4. Imagine a world in which full equality of women and men has been reached.
How would it be different from today?

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

Please give the following information for our statistics:

Age:........................... Male  Female

Country:........................................................................................................................................

Organisation:.................................................................................................................................

Can you think of any ideas or suggestions for the Group?

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

Do you know of any concrete projects in this field that are working well and that the Group
should know about?

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

.......................................................................................................................................................

60
61
62