Ms Orla O'Connor:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to outline the views of the National Women's Council of Ireland on the social dimension of EMU, Economic and Monetary Union.

The National Women's Council of Ireland is the representative organisation for women and women's groups in Ireland with a membership of more than 200 organisations throughout the country. The organisations include diverse organisations such as community-based organisations, organisations dealing with violence against women, and trade union and political party women's committees. I intend to bring their perspective to the table in this presentation.

The objective of promoting equality between men and women is enshrined in the EU treaties whose articles oblige the EU to mainstream gender equality in all its activities. This is crucial for the social dimension of EMU. EU gender equality policy is underpinned by the European pact for gender equality and the strategy for equality between women and men, 2010 to 2015. Europe 2020 contains clear commitments for gender mainstreaming. Those are the core documents for bringing gender equality to the social dimension of the EMU.

The National Women's Council of Ireland gives a general welcome to the inclusion of a social dimension to EMU. As Ireland has gone through the fiscal stability process the outcomes of an absence of a social dimension can be clearly seen, such as the alarming increase in levels of poverty, debt and deprivation. Those statistics highlight the impact on women and on lone parents whose poverty rates have increased during that period.

Social and economic issues are intrinsically linked and this link is highlighted by the communication on the social dimension of the EMU. In order to develop a social dimension of EMU, we need to maximise opportunities to prevent further economic crises.

From the perspective of the National Women's Council of Ireland, I wish to draw the committee's attention to three issues. The first issue is the employment and labour participation of women with the purpose of maximising women's participation in the economy. It is noted that within the EU there is increasingly a focus on the comparatively low levels of participation of women in the labour force. Europe 2020 notes that 63% of women are in work in comparison to 77% of men. The labour force participation rate in Ireland is 53.3% for women in comparison to 68.4% for men. Women are far more likely to be working part-time. Almost 70% of all part-time workers are women and of all women who work, 36% work part-time in comparison to 14% of men. In addition, having a family has a significant impact on women's participation in the labour force whereas it does not have an impact on the participation of men in the workforce. In 2011, the Irish employment rate for women was 85.7% for a woman with a partner but with no children but this rate drops to 51.5% if the youngest child is between the ages of four to five years. OECD statistics show that if a family has more than three children, the participation rate drops below 45%. Children have a significant impact on women's participation rate in the labour force. The same does not impact on men's participation rates.

Failure to maintain women in jobs means that many organisations and businesses are losing very highly skilled workers. This impacts on women's equality and also on competitiveness and growth. In our view, in order to encourage women to work and to remain in work, there is a need to invest in early education, after-school care provisions and flexible working arrangements. There is a need for much greater paid leave arrangements and also paternity leave which is important for fathers and also encourages the distribution of the work of caring for children.

The involvement of women in decision-making is an important aspect of gender equality. The National Women's Council of Ireland argues that the low numbers of women involved in economic decision-making in both the public and private sectors as well as in political decision-making, is another contributing factor to the economic crisis and is an underlying factor which should be addressed by the social dimension of EMU. There is increasing evidence to highlight the impact of the absence of women in decision-making on the financial crisis. A report by the European Commission in 2010, entitled, More Women in Senior Positions - Key to Economic Stability and Growth, stated clearly that a crucial resource for the future growth in Europe lies in the untapped economic potential of women and their full integration into the decision-making processes in all areas of the economy. While women are under-represented in key decision-making areas across Europe, the situation is particularly bad in Ireland with this country rated 19th on a par index. We are much lower than the EU average. Each of these areas can link to indicators that can be used on the scoreboard discussed as part of the social dimension.

The third area is the importance of integrating a gender perspective. The increasing tendency towards gender blindness is a significant factor. Experience has taught us that when policies are gender-blind, the experiences of women are often side-lined. Therefore, policies to support the issues being faced by women are often not appropriate or relevant.

It is known that employment in Ireland remains highly segregated by gender and that the recession and austerity have had different impacts on women and men at different times. While men were highly impacted by the crisis in construction, women were much more affected by consequent job cuts in the service sector and in the public service. We need to take into account these different experiences in assessing how women and men get back into work. The National Women's Council of Ireland has recently launched a piece of research, a woman-friendly model of activation in Ireland, which examines how women and men can be activated differently in order to achieve better outcomes.

On the issue of integrating a gender perspective, we wish to highlight the issue of gender budgeting which is key to future development of EMU. Gender budgeting is an approach to economic policy-making and planning that places gender equality at the centre of decisions on public expenditure and income. For example, the use of gender equality audits and impact assessments can assess how different sections of society are impacted and potential outcomes can also be assessed. This process is under way in other European countries and was used in the past in Scandinavian countries while Scotland is the closest example of the use of gender budgeting and equality budgeting processes. We would like this to be introduced in Ireland incrementally.

I wish to address the issue of social dialogue. The National Women's Council of Ireland welcomes the focus on the importance of social dialogue and the acknowledgement of the contribution it makes in advancing the economy. It is important that in strengthening the social dimension of EMU, social dialogue must go beyond the traditional social partners and be extended to civil society. There must be a deliberate effort to include women's organisations and those directly affected by the recession. This is critical in an Irish context where we have adopted fairly sophisticated methods for consultation with civil society but which do not necessarily lead to changes in outcomes or the impact of the consultation is not often visible.

I refer to the indicators and the scoreboard. From the perspective of the National Women's Council of Ireland, it is important that all proposed indicators need to be gender-disaggregated but there also needs to be specific indicators which target women's equality such as percentages of women with children at work rather than the use of general indicators about employment participation.

There should be indicators that consider, for example, the availability and affordability of child care. It is also important to look at financial investment in the social dimension. From our perspective, gender budgeting is core to that. In addition, budgets should be allocated with reference to the mainstreaming of gender equality and positive actions that seek to address inequalities experienced by women.