Mainstreaming Gender Equality in the EU Green Deal: A Labour Perspective

Abstract

The implementation of the EU Green Deal, aiming at reaching carbon-neutrality by 2050, will entail significant changes for the European society. Starting from one of the three pillars of this strategy—no leaving behind any person—the Author examines this set of green policies—and especially one of its main funding mechanisms, the Just Transition Fund—from a gender equality perspective, assessing its capability to prevent such an epochal change to worsen women’s condition in the labour market. After having demonstrated that gender perspective is less prominent in the Just Transition Fund, if compared with other anti-crisis funding mechanisms adopted by the EU in recent years, the contribution focuses on possible remedies to this flaw, presenting three existing solutions for gender mainstreaming that could be integrated therein: i) the EIGE Gender Impact Assessment Toolkit; ii) Tool No. 11 of the ILO Gender Mainstreaming Strategies; and iii) Gender Equality Plans already integrated in the EU system for funding research. A critical analysis of the aptitude of these solutions to make more gender sensitive, from a labour perspective, the EU green funding system is offered in the final part of the contribution, according to three criteria: efficacy, versatility, and difficulty of implementation.