The European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) undertook, on Wednesday 22 March, an introspection exercise on its practices regarding the inclusion of gender mainstreaming in its work.
Representation
Isabel Santos (S&D, Portuguese) and Malin Björk (The Left, Swedish) presented the quantitative data on gender equality to the LIBE Committee for 2022. In particular, they find that LIBE is the third most female committee in Parliament (53.6%) after the Employment (EMPL) and Women’s Rights (FEMM) committees (see EUROPE 13080/18).
“However, that does not represent the division of responsibilities within the committee”, said Ms Santos, noting that 80% of the Bureau members are men. While the composition of the Bureau “results directly from the committee members’ election”, she called for a mechanism to achieve a more balanced composition.
Furthermore, 44% of the rapporteurs and 51% of the shadow rapporteurs are women. The latter deal more with texts on data protection, migration and non-discrimination, against legislative cooperation and visa policies for men.
Gender and security or migration
For Ms Björk, the challenge now is to ensure that issues “such as security files or migration files” are also subject to gender analysis.
While MEPs have requested a study from the European Parliament on the extent to which LIBE includes gender mainstreaming within its texts, the report already urges to “integrate an intersectional approach to gender mainstreaming” in its reports and opinions.
Intersectionality is about how different forms of oppression intersect to create new experiences of discrimination, said Sarah Chander, co-founder of Equinox. She therefore invited them to ask themselves “which women are my policies working for” to ensure that they also benefit less privileged groups of women.
The inclusion of gender mainstreaming in legislation is one of the priorities of the Swedish Presidency of the EU Council (see EUROPE 13145/24).
Read the report: https://aeur.eu/f/5y8 (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)