Gender-based investments in national recovery and resilience plans

Key points

The EESC:

• points out that most of the national recovery and resilience plans (NRRPs) have been drawn up by the Member States without an ex-ante assessment of the impact of individual investments in terms of removing gender inequalities and making it easier for women to access and stay in the labour market.
• recommends that the Commission adopt comparable specific indicators at the evaluation stage to measure improvements in equal pay, access to the labour market, the reconciliation of work and care time, and in promoting of women's self-entrepreneurship;
• considers it a priority that, when the NRRPs are being implemented, both direct and indirect measures are stepped up. This will require clear, lasting investment channels with resource planning also in the medium-to-long term;
• believes that providing incentives for creating stable, quality jobs for women should be given priority over other occasional incentives, and should be excluded from the State aid map;
• calls for the bonus clause for companies that promote female employment to be strengthened and extended to all public procurement contracts, and for public calls for tender for implementing entities to be regulated with an explicit requirement for gender equality objectives.
• welcomes policy measures for encouraging and supporting self-entrepreneurship provided for in some NRRPs, and calls for the support also to include financial and managerial training and access to financial instruments;
• considers it important when implementing the NRRPs to take action on the taxation aspect by offering tax breaks on the second source of household income for low-income households, and on the income of less-affluent, single-parent families;
• believes it paramount to invest resources in services for reconciling working time and time spent on long-term care, to provide additional services, and to make these services available to low‑income households;
• believes that specific investments to incentivise women's participation in the medium and long term in technical and scientific institutes and university courses, which can promote women's employment in sectors that are currently male-dominated, can no longer be postponed;
• recommends gender budgeting at all levels of public administration to be made mandatory in the European Semester phase.