 Good evening, everybody. Welcome to our second webinar of the project Feminist in the Climate Movement on behalf of the Green European Foundation in partnership with the Polish Foundation Sterefajeleni and another Green Foundation from Finland, Green Economics Institute and the Green Foundation from Belgium. Today, the last webinar, the first Polish webinar was about just transition. We were in a very good company. I'll give you the link to the first webinar during our session today. And today, after this just transition, we will speak about money and women. And why? Because without money, women cannot do anything. Money is really something that is necessary for actions to give and to guarantee real equality. Funds are absolutely necessary. And this is something that is a big problem. So today, we will speak about the European Recovery Fund and the European Green Deal and the Polish Recovery Fund and what is the situation, how it is benefiting women. So I will ask our coordinator, one of our two coordinators of the project. The other one is Aleksandra Kołeczek, who was moderating the first webinar. Now Magdalena Gaukiewicz. She's the secretary of the Polish Green Party. And I didn't present myself. I'm Ewa Sofimzakmar. I am president of the board of the Polish Green Foundation, Stefan Geleni. And I'm a member of the board of the Green European Foundation. So Magdalena Gaukiewicz, our coordinator, I give you the floor and asking you to present our speakers. Thank you, Ewa. Hello everyone. So I really warm welcome to our guests. It's really a great array of experts today. Firstly, I welcome Aleksandra Gies, which is a member of the European Parliament from Germany, initiator of the Gender Impact Assessment Next Generation EU Report and initiator also as well of the Halvobit campaign. Our second panelist is Dr. Ewa Ruminska-Zimne, a feminist economist from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, associated with the Congress of Women and an expert on gender budgeting. And finally, Urszola Dzielńska, our green member of the Polish Parliament who fights for women's rights within the Parliament and with protesters on the streets. So thank you very much, girls, to being here, for being here. And I'm sure that we will have an insightful discussion today. Well, so as Ewa said, our topic is the European Green Deal and EU Recovery Fund. And gender perspective on that. And here my first question to Aleksandra Gies, because you are initiator on this report, Gender Impact Assessment. And could you please give us a visibility what this report was initialized for and what are the results of this report? And then also I would like to ask you about this campaign, Halvobit, what it was about and what the results are. The floor is yours, Aleksandra. Thank you very much, Magdalena. Thank you very much, Ewa, for those friendly words of introduction. Could I, and good evening to everybody listening, could I have my presentation on the screen? Yes, I think I need to give you a role or it's already done. It is done, you can share the screen. Yeah, so you should share the screen. You have a button on the bottom of the plate, you have share screen button. Here we go. Yeah, great. Okay, perfect. Yes, so thank you all very much for this opportunity to present Next Generation EU, the half of the campaign and especially the Gender Impact Assessment we did on Next Generation EU at a very early stage. So it's not a final Gender Impact Assessment on what Next Generation EU became, became in the end, but it was something we did in the very beginning. What you see here is the day we launched the campaign that was in May 2020. And that's me and then the president of the Gender Mainstreaming Network of the European Parliament. Together it was in full COVID, so we had to keep the distance and we couldn't, you know, we would have wanted to be a lot of women holding that, but we could only be two for COVID reasons and lockdown reasons. So this is how it all started. Why did it start? Okay, why did I demand half of it? It was quite clear that already in April 2020 the COVID was not only a global health crisis, but it was also giving rise to a huge economic crisis, probably the worst recession the Western world has seen since World War II. And what was interesting from a gender point of view that it was hitting women particularly hard for a series of reasons. One was very obvious. I don't know how the situation evolved in Poland, but in many European countries, including mine, Germany and Italy, the other country that I know very well in Europe because I used to live there. The first thing to close were schools and childcare institutions. And when you close schools and childcare institutions, children just don't just go away. I mean, they still require being attended to, being taught, being cared for. And this is done in families and families very often still means mothers. So many mothers had to work from home at the same time while they were taking care of their children, which whoever has or has ever tried to do that knows it doesn't work. So you first take care of your children and then at night you work rather than sleeping, which put a huge pressure on women. And many women had to reduce the working hours or drop out of the labor market altogether because it was impossible to handle. And the second reason why this was particularly hard on women is because COVID hit those sectors where people work with people, so-called client-facing sectors. And this is usually where women work. And you see a list of the sectors here. Let me see if I can go to presentation mode. Just give me a second. Here, full screen. Okay, great. This is it. So those sectors that were particularly hit, you see them on the slide were educational, healthcare and social, which is surprising because we would think that those people had to do more work, but there's a lot of private healthcare, a lot of private social services that had faced a big crisis. Food and accommodation, so hotels and restaurants and so on, arts and culture, all the artists and domestic services. And you see that in most sectors, there was a very, very high share of women retailers, another one as well. So you see the purple part are women and the blue part are men. And you see that those sectors where women worked were particularly hit. Then as greens, we fought very hard, especially as German greens in order to have next generation EU, therefore a health package that would be for the European economy that would be funded and guaranteed for all countries, including countries with a strong economy as Germany. But then when the EU Recovery Fund on Next Generation EU came, I was quite disappointed because there is a strong focus on the green transition, which from a green point of view obviously is very good. 37% of the money goes to the green transition and 20% goes to the digital transition, which is also important than digital politics. I know how important this is. But those are sectors where very, very few women work. And if you have a look at the sectors that benefit, it's basically construction and agriculture is a little bit apart. It's listed here, but it's not really in next generation EU now. Construction energy, renewable energies and transport. This is basically the green transition. Those are the three sectors concerned. And those are industrial sectors where the share of women being employed is below 20%. And then the fourth one is ICT, information and communication technology for the digital transition. The Europe wide share of women working in that area is 17%. So what I noticed in May was we have a crisis that is hitting women for a series of reasons. And we have a recovery package to support the economy. And that means to support the people that is earmarked to male dominated sectors. So women are losing jobs. I have to drop out of the labor market and do more unpaid work. And the money is going to the man. And I think this is not possible. I mean, it's so obvious in this crisis that this is not right, that I need to do something about it. And therefore we asked, this was basically an intuition in May. And I couldn't prove it in any way. It was just a feeling I had from talking to trade associations and concerned women and then looking at the first proposal of the commission that didn't even mention women basically didn't mention a gender perspective at all. And therefore we asked two economists to do a gender impact assessment on this first proposal of the commission, which is what they did. And they found out that actually next generation, you as it was proposed by the European Commission was completely gender blind and didn't absolutely take into account the gender perspective. And it confirmed everything I explained before. Okay, how does this go forward? Sorry. Okay, here we go. So the study was conducted by Dr. Elisabeth Klazer from Austria and Azura Rinaldi, Dr. Azura Rinaldi from Italy. And it concluded, as I said, that most of the money would be invested into male dominated sectors and that the proposals were not living up to the EU legal obligations, not to the political commitments of the European Commission. And therefore it recommended that in addition to the focus on the digital and the green transformation, we needed a further emphasis on investment in paid care work. The care transition was another goal we had. Therefore, what did we demand in the parliament's position? First of all, the inclusion of gender equality as a binding principle into the guidelines for the recovery and resilience facility, which is the recovery and resilience facility is the core of next generation EU with 670 billion euros. Then we asked for gender mainstreaming to be a horizontal principle. And very specifically, we asked for gender impact assessments to be done on the national plans, you know, this facility works in a way that the European Commission basically makes the money available, but the countries, the member states, have to set out a national plan and how they intend to spend that money. And that plan has to comply with the requirements set out in the regulation. So this is what we're talking about. So what we asked for and at a certain point, we had a broad majority in parliament, where these gender impact assessments for the national plans, where for each national plan, experts would have to look at every single measure and decide whether that's gender equal or not. And if it's not what can be done about it. And that would have been, I think, really the silver bullet to make sure that men and women benefit equally and to make sure that these funds are well spent. Because if you don't do that analysis, you don't achieve growth, even less sustainable growth, and you don't really help the recovery of the economy. So that was our main point that we asked for sex-disaggregated data, which is very important, because if we are saying the money is not going to the women, we have to give some evidence. And as long as you don't have that evidence, and you don't, as long as you don't have that numbers, it's very difficult to prove. And there's always someone saying, oh, it's not true, and women are married anyway. So I think we really need that data and that analysis. That's the basic basis really for gender budgeting. Okay, then there are a few more things that I would skip for sake of time, but I can share the presentation later if you're interested in seeing the details. So what did we get, actually? We had a very, very strong position of the European Parliament. But as you know, the Parliament doesn't decide on its own, but it has to come to an agreement with the European Council. And the Council, where the member states' governments are represented, was a dead set against any kind of gender perspective, even less gender impact assessments, gender budgeting, and so on. So we had a very difficult trilog, which is that process in which the European Parliament and the European Council tried to find an agreement in order to come up with a regulation. And obviously we had time pressure because, especially the southern countries in Europe really desperately need this money. So we had to be quick. And there were other things to negotiate. And as it often happens, the interests of women were not really supported the way they should have been supported. And we lost the really strong point of the Parliament, which were the gender impact assessments. We came back then to, there is a guiding principle anyway in terms of gender mainstreaming, but it's not really binding. And we don't have clear objectives and targets. And this is the problem we have today. I came after that happened. I went back to talking to the Commission, the Task Force Recover, which is really the task force working directly for the Commission President on this topic. And they were quite open for it. It's led by a woman and they were quite open. And they agreed to taking up some of our recommendations in the guidelines. Well, they sort of listened to our recommendations and saw the data and the evidence we provided that it's useful. And then they came up with guidelines that the national governments had to abide by while setting out the plans. And these guidelines say that the member states need to describe how the measures will contribute to gender equality and the mainstreaming of the subjectives. And they shall outline the most important national challenges in terms of gender equality, equality of treatment, opportunities between men and women. They need to explain what happened during COVID crisis to women and how the national plans foster gender equality, which is at least a requirement which forces member states to deal with the topic. So I'm not particularly satisfied with many of the answers that national governments are giving, but at least the topic has been brought up and they have to work on it. They have to think about it. And there are some very interesting plans like the Spanish plan, for example, some interesting things in the Finnish plan. So I mean, there are some positive examples. I'm not satisfied on average, but there are some interesting things in the plan. So this is where I think we did achieve something because at least the topic was talked about especially in Italy. There was a really, really huge public campaign because a lot of journalists picked up the half of the campaign and talked about it. So there was a growing awareness on how important economic independence is and how important women's jobs are for growth overall in a country for social cohesion and for social justice. Well, we did achieve something extremely important on the other hand was in the multi-annual financial framework, which is the seven-year budget for the European Union that runs starts, the next one starts, the first of January 2021. I started actually and runs until 2027. And there's a thing called the inter-institutional agreement on the multi-annual framework. And there we have a provision on gender budgeting and gender equality that is really, really good. And for the first time, it's something very, very concrete where we can measure the progress, the commission and make it. So it basically says two very important things. First of all, the assessment of gender impact needs to be strengthened in impact assessments and evaluations under the better lawmaking framework. So this is sort of eurospeak. What it means is that the European Commission, every time it comes up with the legislative proposal, it has to do an impact assessment which usefully has three dimensions, the economic dimension, the social dimension, the ecological dimension, and it considers smaller medium and the impact on smaller medium enterprises. And so here for the first time, we need, they need to consider the gender impact as well. The new guidelines the commission has come up with are not satisfying yet, but at least we have a legal basis really to work on this. And I think we, the commission will, will be able to do better. What is really going well is the second requirement. The commission has to develop a methodology to measure the relevant expenditure at program level, which means the money that is actually being spent in the Monte-Iron framework and has to use this methodology as soon as it is available and no later than January 1st, 2023, it will implement that methodology for certain centrally managed programs to test its visibility. So what does it mean? It has to find a methodology to track where the money goes, to which beneficiary it goes according to a gender perspective. So ideally we end up with a budget that clearly says, okay, these funds from agriculture, 20% go to women, 80% go to men. I mean, we prefer to be 50-50, but I think that's not the reality. So if this works, we will have very, very clear numbers where this money is going and who is benefiting from it. And that will be really the political basis having the facts to say, okay, how can this be gender mainstreaming? How can this be equality among citizens, between citizens if 80% of the money is going to 50% of the population? We don't know what the numbers will be, but we can all imagine. So this is really, really important to have this tracking methodology. So at midterm, which is in the middle of the seven years starting from 2021, so it's going to be 24, 25, it will be explored whether that methodology can be extended to other programs for the remainder of the multi-annual financial framework. And the other programs means like the structural funds, agricultural funds, research, and so on. And that's extremely important because this means it's going to arrive in the member states. And the member states will have to come up with gender disaggregated data, and they will have to implement this. And I think this is going to be a huge debate. So I know it's a long timeframe, 20, 24, 25 sounds very long, but considering how much time we've been speaking about gender budgeting and not been doing anything, I think this is really huge, huge progress. And this is something where we can work on. I've tried to start working on this in my member state, which is Germany and in my region, basically, to try to come up with something similar to raise awareness to tell people, okay, this is coming anyway, whether you like it or not, but it's coming. And I know from my direct contact that the commission, the Director General for Budget is really keen on doing this because when they started really studying the topic and looking at all the material, they realized this is really key in order to have a sustainable and successful economy that allows for social cohesion. This is not only good for women, this is good for everybody. So I think this is really, really important and we should keep working on it. One more element. There is a special report of the European Court of Auditors, which is the auditing body of the European Union. And these reports are held in very high, is themed by the European institutions. And they're very interesting. And this one particularly is also easy to read, so I really recommend it to everybody on gender mainstreaming in the EU budget. So it formulates a series of recommendations, clearly strengthening the institutional framework for supporting gender mainstreaming, which means having better legislation incorporating the gender perspective in the legislation. It asks the commission to carry out gender analysis of needs and impacts, update its better regulation guidelines, which it has been doing, which it's been done. It's not satisfying, but there are further documents down the line. And we will insist on these documents being better than the first one. And then especially systematically collect, analyze and report existing sex disaggregated data for the EU funding programs. And that will mean that for agricultural or structural funds, where a lot of money goes to Poland, for example, you will really have an instrument to ask for gender disaggregated data. And you will be able to prove where this money goes. And this makes it a lot easier to have a strong political message saying, okay, this is not justice, this is not right. And we need to fight for more equality. So other, another recommendation on gender related objectives and indicators, which is something the commission is progressively incorporating in its budget. And obviously, as we said at the beginning on the recovery and resilience plans, it says also we need to assess and report whether those gender equality objectives are being met. And we keep working on this, you know, in the first round, as I said before, it looks as if the national plans are not addressing this adequately, but we insisting on monitoring this correctly. And we will definitely come back to it. Okay, so this would be my round of introduction and first introduction to the topic. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Alexandra. It's really interesting insight on this situation in the European Union. And I really think it's very important to have this data on European and national level and indisputable condition to go forward on this topic. And right now, I would like to ask Eva Rumis-Kajimne, because you are an expert on gender budgeting. Could you please tell us what is exactly the gender budgeting? What is the idea? What is about? What is the history maybe in the European Union? What are the competences of European Union on this matter? And is this any practice on the Union, European Union, or maybe in Poland? Eva, the floor is yours. Okay, thank you very much for this introduction. And maybe I will start with a short comment on what Alexandra has said. And I would like to congratulate on the steps, further steps in this battle to put gender issues really in the agenda of ministers of final set economy, you know, ministers who actually are responsible for the budgets and for where the money goes. I remember very well the discussion which we had in the European Parliament. I was at the hearings, a very small agenda item on the hearings for the budget which just ended in 2020. And the hearings were done as far as I recall in 2012. And it was around the report which was called Investing in Europe's Future. And this was about making Europe competitive, sustainable, and whatever. And then, you know, the whole report has only one or two tables which were gender desegregated as far as data are concerned. And they had a lot of discussion on how to make Europe competitive, how to improve the labour market, you know, how to make Europe being a high tech hub. But in fact, gender issues and equality issues were only in a small section which was at the end of the report. And it was clearly said that in all European projects in which were investigated in the past from the perspective of how the money are spent in these projects, you know, the preambles of the projects has very nice words about core value, gender equality is a core value. But if they look at how actions were defined and how funds are allocated for this purpose and also how indicators of problems were allocated, then you didn't see anything there. You know, there was, for example, the goal was to improve the share of, they increase the employment rate. But there was not said about women and men. It was just about the general improvement in employment rates. So in fact, it was useless in terms of doing something. So what you presented now, it's reassuring because it's a next step forward. This is a discussion about how the money are spent. And I believe it's truly essential. Without that, I believe we will not achieve any progress in gender equality. This will remain on paper. And in fact, Poland is a EU member since 2004 and has all this wonderful legislation adopted and nothing happens. For example, the wage gap, we still have 20% of the wage gap between women and men, even if it's in fact forbidden in Polish law in the EU regulations and the other right, et cetera. So I think gender budget is a great tool to achieve it. The problem is, of course, that you need so-called political will to do it, to start with. I will talk about that later on. Maybe I would just say a few words, what it is gender budgeting and what are the experiences. And then I will move a little bit what is needed to actually do it. Well, it's rather simple because gender budgets, the first gender budgets were done by Australia in 1964, quite a long time ago. It was very up to the fashionable topic among the feminist economics research in 1990s, 1980s, 1990s later on also. Elizabeth Klasser was one of the women and established a network of gender budgeting economists in Europe. So she's very, you know, you refer to her work and I think it's fantastic what she has achieved. But many countries started to use it. Over 60, 70 countries now worldwide are using gender budgeting at different levels, you know, starting from Austria to Scandinavian countries like Sweden, but also UK has some recommendations on the UK budgets done by independent gender budgeting group. But also you do it at municipality level. Berlin, the city of Berlin is doing city of Stockholm. You can do it also San Francisco. You can also do it at the local community level. So you can do it at any level. And it doesn't mean that you will have a budget which is 50% for men, 50% of women. You will not also have a specific special budget for that. What you need, you need to answer to the key question and make evaluation of the existing budget of a city, municipality, local authority or the country to what extent it promotes gender equality or not. Because in the budget you have always compromises and money is never enough. So you have to decide if you, for example, or build a parking lot or football stadium or you will have investments in playground for kids or kindergarteners. So you have to have the voices of men and women hurt in the process of preparing a budget, any budget, national budget, but also the local community budget. Well, these voices of women are not hurt. Women are not decision-making position in the finance sector, but also in parliamentarian committees on the budget mostly. So their voices are not hurt and the requirements for the budget are really built according to the men's needs. You make a very wonderful slide showing where the money goes and what sectors are affected in pandemic. And this is very clear, it has always been like that. Male dominated sectors were receiving funds first of all, later on, this was where women, the sectors when women was employed. This was in 2008-2009 crisis. This was very clear picture. So what we need in fact to, we need to equalize through the gender budgeting process the bias, the gender bias in economics and the way the economics rules and regulations were done for the labor market, for the finance sector and so on. The difference between the position of the men and women is because women are responsible for the unpaid work. And this unpaid work is not visible in the GDP calculations similar as the green expenditure for the pollution and other cost side effects of the industrial development. It's the same, unpaid work is not reflected in the GDP. In general in European countries it's over one third of the GDP. It's a lot. In Poland it's between 40 and 50 percent of the average wage. So this is a contribution which is completely invisible of the official GDP but it's also invisible on the side of how GDP is spent. What are the priorities and priority expenditure? So the gender budget is in fact showing the possibilities how to do it. Is it easy or not to do it? No, it's not easy. It's not easy to do it because as I say what you need to do it first to have a political will at the level of the national government and certainly if I may say about Poland this will is not there. This will is still focused around a very traditional view what should be a woman's role in a society and the economy and what should be the male role. Men are considered to be the major breadwinners and women are primarily mothers. So all the system which is in our plans for the future recovery is around that. To make women going back home through different sort of transfers and to make them primarily mothers and then joining the labor market when it will be feasible and men paint the main sort of providers to the family and this is whole structures around very traditional view of the family and men and women and then the kids. Single mothers untypical families are not part of this plan which is a mistake because the model of the family has changed a lot. So what you need is political will but later on you need gender desegregated data. We do have some but still in Poland we miss a lot and still we do not have many of this data available but as I said you need to hear what women need and you have to hear women's voices. It means you need participation in political decision making of women and women's groups, women's NGOs, women's movement. This is not the case and tools are there and I would not worry about tools how to actually do the gender budgeting because European Institute for Gender Equality Aga has produced a very beautiful toolkit this same as I wonder gender mainstreaming and for many others you know how to eliminate the wage gap they are all there but they need to be used and the problem is that countries actually and the level of the national decision makers they are not so ready to use it. If I'm talking about Poland Polish decision makers are very conservative as I mentioned and with this government I doubt if it will change. Of course you need to have specific actions and successes and so on you need for example if we look at the very two core areas when the new recovery plan for Europe is going forward it means digital transformation and the green transformation both sectors that may dominate the energy sector and the energy sector and you need some focus specifically addressing women, women's education in IT, women's promotion in this sector and some of the targeted actions. This is by the way the recommendation of the House of Commons the Parliamentary Committee on Gender Equality for the UK plans that they do incorporate all the specific actions. This is in Poland we are very far from that so you know what we need we need really to make it more specific and also we need more actions in a broader context you know how to relate work and family how to include this unpaid work into the GDP calculations. This is not enough to do just the gender budgeting this has to come together with other actions. If I would think about calling it briefly we have to move from the very traditional model of economy to the partnership model which is much more than just to have the gender budgeting. This is a quite lengthy process and I was wondering to what extent the European Union can play a role and of course the European Union is doing a lot having this very powerful legislation in place but how to make it a transfer from the legislation and the proposals and what you propose to the national level is a problem because all the gender issues are soft issues and they are up to the national decision makers to decide how they want to implement their directives. And frankly you know when I'm thinking about what could be done I'm really thinking more on the move first of all merging forces with the Greens and having a certain combination of the pressure from the you know bottom side it means the green movement in Poland and the women's movement in Poland could together fight for that but at the same time what you proposed is the pressure from the European Commission actually for countries to report on how they spent money. It's already many obligations in this respect we have a special unit in the Ministry of Development who should follow you know gender mainstreaming and how the gender equality is represented in the spending but so far I must say it's not very effective. So let me just maybe finish here we could see if we can have some solutions more practical steps to be taken but I would say first what we need in Poland is to make a gender impact assessment of the recovery plan national recovery plan which will be properly done by a group of experts hopefully with the support of the European Union but also what you do to link it and to have it because if not done by the government I hope the best way will be to do it by the government but if not it could be done independently as a sort of a shadow report and then we could have at least a ground on which we stand and we will know what's at stake. My view is looking at the situation in Poland that we are moving backwards in gender equality because of what happened to the to the restriction of the abortion law to the ideas to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention but also how the pandemic affected Polish women on the labour market in Warsaw every four women lost their job and unpaid work increased and I must say 45% as far as I remember from the recent survey said that they cannot work from home because they have kids to take care about and some elderly parents so this has to be solved and I hope it could be solved together with other you know countries but also with the Green Movement. I think this alliance is very timely and I really like to thank Eva for the invitation to this panel so I will stop here and I would be happy to to just you know have discussion later on. Thank you Eva so much for this insight and well yeah Alexandra and Eva have mentioned that the political will is the condition to change on the gender budgeting matter and here I have a question for Ula you are the women's right fighter not only on the streets but on the parliament Polish parliament can we talk about the political will on the subject on this Polish parliament at all and if this topic appears in our parliament if there's any gender budgeting elements in the Polish recovery fund and also I would like to ask you not only in the in the perspective of the ruling parties but the question if there is any mention concerning the gender budgeting instance in the opposition side and finally will Polish women benefit from the recovery plan adopted in Poland? Thank you very much Magda and good evening everyone. It's a very good question and I think talking about gender budgeting in the current circumstances in Poland feels a little bit like a luxury um to be completely honest with you right now because I have a feeling we are yes we are talking about women rights in parliament but we're talking about absolute basics rather than making progress. We are um in defence mode rather than progressing ahead. We are more and more often um since 2015 specifically battling um very uh backwards um looking legislative projects introduced in parliament which are aimed to ban abortion and either entirely or just about entirely. We are battling projects which mean to reduce um or um acts um sexual um education and any gender education from schools um and really are working very clearly against women and we are battling a very toxic narrative um from the high governmental official officials for example from the minister of education who keeps um who keeps saying things publicly which sound like um I'm not exaggerating like taken directly from some speeches by some um authoritarian politicians I don't want to even you know call their names from 1933 and I even have made a direct side-by-side comparison of some of those quotes just to make sure I'm not really um you know that that's what is happening and this is what is happening so so I feel we really are very um very strongly going backwards and really fighting for for the basic freedoms and the best um example of that were huge mass protests that took place during the pandemic literally at the peak of the second wave of the pandemic starting in October when a motion was put through to the constitutional tribunal to try and put a force through an ultimate almost a ban on abortion bypassing the parliament and it actually succeeded and hundreds and thousands of women you know went on the streets um despite of of really um of the peak of pandemic and that is the best I think picture and an example of what is really happening and and yes I did look into the recovery and resilience plan and you know searched it through um in the context of gender budgeting and and yes it's there to a certain extent and there are our Polish recovery resilience plan is a 500 page document almost a 500 page document and I counted just to be precise women being mentioned there exactly 47 times and the gender budgeting or um um you know talk about the principle of gender equality ensuring equal opportunities for all it's there on two pages page 90 and page 91 if you want to you know really um go and and have a and have a read and it does propose solutions like um building teleworking opportunities improving access to internet developing digital competences secure childcare um yes it's there and it talks at the same time the talk is very general um in my opinion we talk about um that the recovery projects will comply with all accessibility standards including principle of equal opportunities we will prevent all forms of discrimination um we will comply with the principle um you know of um of of um rights um equal rights for all but um it whilst it it does look okay on paper um I feel it's very theoretical precisely because of what is happening in practice um and I feel like this is there to satisfy the European Commission um to get the European Commission to approve the funding and then we'll we'll see how it will look in practice and um in reality um um we we the facts are um quite as I said and the statistics are quite um I'm not very favorable for women um so our employment rate is lower um than average um than the European average the pay gap um still exists as my predecessor said um we have um we have the legislative changes which was the the almost um a full ban on abortion just now um our politicians openly criticized the east and wanted to actually revoke the Istanbul convention in sorry Istanbul convention and it is it keeps coming back as a topic um and also um even the social program which is a kind of a flagship social program introduced by the government um by the current government back in 2016 that was meant to foster demographic growth it actually what it actually led to was um it didn't foster the demographic growth at all but instead it lowered the employment rate amongst women by another two to three percentage points it put us back um and at the same time it doesn't secure any pension um support whilst women are taken out of the job market um due to this um due to this um program so for all those reasons I have deep concerns that the two page um two page fragments from our recovery and resilience plans are there just to take the box and the reality is very much going in in in in the opposite direction so I really really would welcome any you know any attempts to track and measure this from the European Commission from the European Parliament um and to to to help us um kind of monitor um how it's executed and how the funds are invested and whether this is happening in a really just and equal way um I really hope for this but I think it does require actual tight measurements because the the two pages and the 47 mentions will not do it um alone so so that's that's my view on this um perhaps a bit pessimistic given the the the past years which were quite intense but I think it's I'm hoping it's picturing the reality we're in thank you Ula so much for this insight on the one that's happening in Poland I'm right now I'm looking at the chat and the Q&A we have no question Eva maybe you would like to ask some additional questions for our panelists and yes I would like to make one comment and ask one question to Alexandra um when because people they sometimes they don't see how we can address at the same time a green topic so green transition and and keep address equality gender equality and I wanted to give you two examples for the same result but going from two methods for example I remember that there was a program of the embassy of Switzerland in Poland to it was a program to for the thermal modernization of housing and installation of photovolta leaks for single mothers so um at the same time they they had a climate result and at the same time they had uh energy poverty they addressed energy poverty and that they addressed the gender inequality so and when the Austrians I just to to recall that the greens are in the government as the smaller coalition a smaller partner in the coalition they they decided to put 60 percent of the budget to the climate but they made a big program addressing energy poverty and so it was not directly addressing women in the program because with the partner from center right it was not possible but they knew that addressing energy poverty most of the beneficent of this program will be women so and the single families and low income public and in this low income public and with bad housing people with bad quality of housing they knew that women will be in majority in this population so without addressing it directly they knew that they're addressing women so so you can um you can find a method political way to to do it um to do it together but I have another question to Alexandra because I was really surprised when I read the first time the European Green Deal the communication of the European Commission on the European Green Deal in December 2019 that there was nothing no one word about gender and gender equality and so on and I was so shocked so my question is uh was it any debate on it in in the European Parliament did you speak about that okay I'll just the last question first if I if I may um very honestly um I haven't addressed it but just because I've been so busy with next generation you and then my main field of politics is digital policy and this is really I mean this is happening every day right now and it's really urgent and we'll we have to hand in all our amendments by the day after tomorrow so we have to finish tomorrow basically I just simply haven't had the time but it's it's a very very good point and I discovered that the European the Green Group and the European Parliament did in 2012 a gender impact assessment on their proposal for the Green Deal because let's remember that the Green Deal comes from the Green Party and not from the line and the Commission picked it up um and there was the gender impact assessment done with a lot of very valuable recommendations which which I intend to pick up as soon as I have time and this brings us to your first question which was extremely relevant because that's a question that's very often asked and it's it's very important and in the beginning I thought it was sort of a dilemma as well until I started studying the issue and then it gets really really interesting because actually addressing gender equality you also improve sustainability and combat and climate change and everything it goes hand in hand really you mentioned one one interesting example and you said the Austrians have an international plan as well on on energy poverty and housing for single mothers and so on um what I really like are the projects that see women more in the driver seat you know not at the receiving end but really taking the decisions um we know for example that women make as consumers and they often make the the choices in households and family what is being bought and they make more sustainable choices there's a lot of research on this fact that that women choose the sustainable product that for them it's a criteria for choosing a product and so on so that women as consumers are very important um women as people if they take decisions and I think Eva mentioned that before it's also gender budgeting is not also about distributing the money but it's also about organizing a more democratic form of of popular participation so asking women's group asking the women's movement asking also other groups of the population and not always the usual people who decide on women politics for example on mobility for example urban mobility you know if you ask men what they intend by mobility they will say we need streets for our cars and we need parking lots and if you ask women they will say we need public transport and we need to be able to walk safely because we work with our children we work with the buggy we work with our elderly parents or have trouble walking and who need a lot of space and so on who need to be safe and they don't call for words they call for public transport for cycling paths and and for walkways so you make a lot more sustainable choices in cities where you listen to women and Vienna is a great example for that in Vienna they have some forms of gender budgeting they're quite advanced and one thing that has really changed is the mobility in Vienna so women make the world more sustainable if they're asked there's even proof that women make more sustainable choices when they lead companies women companies that are female lead with female CEOs or female majority in the board have reduced the co2 emissions more quickly than male dominated companies and I thought that was crazy when I heard this for the first time but this was I was told this by the European investment bank they did the research and this is something that when they invest in the rest of the world what what they call you know economic cooperation with the rest of the world development aid this is considered obvious the women are always involved in the decision making it's just when it comes to Europe they think oh it's already done we don't need it and that shows how important the political will is because if you have women making the choices the choices will be more sustainable and we will reduce our emissions more quickly we will live in a more sustainable way so it's really there's no dilemma between choosing sustainability and greening and choosing gender equality if you choose gender equality automatically you choose greening as well yes this is an excellent answer and we observe it at COP every COP so this climate summits and when there was this action plan climate action for gender one of big topics was the decision making and inside the negotiations because the delegations we know that the consequences of climate change more more painful for women women are the first victims or climate change and climate disasters and so on and the migration climate migrations and so on and but at the COP the delegation national delegations are dominated by men so they go they come from seven to 40 percent of women that delegation with seven percent of female members in the delegation so they were trying to make it more equal and after when we start the different bodies that make decisions it's never equality between men and women and when there are bodies that decide on finance there are practically no women at all so and so this is this this decision making concerning money and how funds are spent this is really a huge priority and this is what we must fight for as women if we want to have equality when a woman and more sustainable word and achieving climate goals so I believe that we came to the end and I will just give you one minute to each of you for the word of conclusion starting maybe to by Urshula if she was the last one and thank you so I I have to conclude more optimistically because I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I if I couldn't find hope so so absolutely the green policies honestly are for me that's a way to combine the two and just as as as some of you just mentioned just now it's in doing two in one if we can improve equality that's great and that's exactly what we're all about so I just absolutely believe in this you know stronger European bonds and the green groups working across the countries learning from one another and then working with the European Commission and with the European Parliament to help strengthen the central measuring and monitoring that if that all works together then then then we will improve it even in troublemaker countries like Poland, Hungary and you know others so so that's that's what I'm working towards and that's my hope that's where I'm pinning my hopes on and thank you for for giving me ideas and and some energy from from where you are and where you're working on it so it's really great to know and and get that energy from you thank you very much so Eva what is your conclusion I would like to to add that you are in the board of the Congress of Women that is rather exceptional organization of women and they not only in Poland but there is Polish Congress of Women in Brussels in Berlin in Prague in Vienna in Paris so Polish women organize themselves to to debate to find solutions to organize themselves it's wonderful so the word of conclusion Eva yes thank you very much again for listening about an opportunity to listen to all these interesting presentations I'm really very hopeful what Alexandra has presented you know I believe it's a next step and it's a solid step and I would like to maybe see the opportunities to use it also to to be used by national level so I'm wondering in what way this what you're doing the European Parliament could be more linked of what we do in Poland specifically by in that national level and how we can link not necessarily going only to the government but also using the women's movement which is very strong and green movement I think coming together for the purpose because I think it's an opportunity the pandemic and recovery plan and this reconciliation is it's an opportunity to move ahead and to say hey women are the force and we cannot forget the demographic context women are needed on the labor market they also produce new labor if they give birth etc we have the force so how to use it and how to change the system which is now unfortunately still very oppressive for gender equality so Alexandra you have the last word thank you so much I don't need to say much because you're so great you've already said everything I would just like to add that this is I think I share the view that we have a unique opportunity here with this process starting at the level of the European Union the monitoring of the recovery and resilience facility the awareness that has been raised around the ideas of economic equality and especially this gender budgeting process starting in the European budget because this will have a great impact in the long term it will take a few years but it will have a great impact on member states and especially on member states as Poland who have a huge share of those funds and you really need this these don't your government really needs those funds so I think that's that's extremely important and let's let's cooperate on this very really looking forward to this I think it's important when there's a strong pushback as especially in Poland and a few other countries to go forward even stronger you know not to stay on the defensive but to try to fight for something else and if you achieve some kind of economic equality it's a lot easier to fight for rights as well because women who have their own income are a lot less dependent also from the views of men because I mean they're independent they don't need to depend on men and they express their views also more freely and well the last point I think was that you made that gender equality in greening go together and this is why I think fighting for gender equality is so important for the green parties as well because it all goes in the in the same direction and it's it's not the same fight but that two fights that are closely related and I'm happy to be part of a party that really fights for these issues. Thank you thanks to all of you thanks Magdalena thanks to all our partners and we will continue this discussion at our green summer university for the first time we will have with us a green congress of women so together with the congress of women we will be all together and we will continue also on this topic of finance and the gender budgeting thanks a lot and good luck to all of us thank you thank you thank you have a good one have a good evening