Ahead of the International Women’s Day, PES Women is raising awareness to the causes underlying the unequal access to the labour market and calling for the implementation of concrete measures to tackle it.

On 5th March PES Women President Zita Gurmai addressed a crowd of young people at the Winter University of ECOSY to present the PES campaign ‘Your future is my future: Women count too’. The campaign calls for the implementation of a European Youth Guarantee that can provide a solution to unemployed young people; Mrs. Gurmai underlined the gender perspective of youth unemployment and its long term effects.

PES Women and ECOSY support the campaign "Your future is my future"

Photo gallery

Zita Gurmai said: “PES Women fully supports the PES campaign to tackle youth unemployment, a reality that touches 1 out of 2 young people in some EU countries. As PES Women President I would also like to stress that there is a gender perspective to youth unemployment. While the numbers might not enlighten us much, the specific causes of youth unemployment among women and their long term effects must not be ignored. We need to address these specific causes, namely gender segregation in education/ labour market and the lack of work-family life balance, in order to prevent a wider gender pay gap and a regression in the number of working women.” 

PES Women’s proposals include developing gender sensitive orientation policies in schools; capacity-building and trainings to develop new skills for women; developing new jobs, especially green jobs and jobs in the care sector for women and men; strengthening policies to reconcile professional and private life, especially through the advancement of Maternity Leave Directive at European level.