Resolution of the Council and of the Ministers of Education meeting within the Council of 3 June 1985 containing an action programme on equal opportunities for girls and boys in education

The Resolution sets out an agreement between the European Council and the Ministers of Education to make the necessary funds available in their respective educational systems to:

• Ensure equal opportunities for girls and boys for access to all forms of education and all types of training;
• Enable girls and boys to make educational and career choices that will afford them equal possibilities with regard to employment and economic independence;
• Motivate girls and boys to choose non-traditional occupations in order that they have access to a more diversified range of jobs, and;
• Encourage girls as well as boys to participate in new markets, in particular, information technologies and biotechnology.

Foci of the action programme include: promoting awareness amongst those in education on the need to achieve equality between girls and boys; educational and vocational guidance as a service to all pupils to encourage girls and boys to diversify their career choices; developing a balance between men and women holding position of responsibility in education, and; eradicating persistent stereotypes from school textbooks, teaching, assessment and guidance material.

Commission Recommendation of 24 November 1987 on vocational training for women

The Commission recommends that Member States adopt a policy to encourage the participation of young and adult women in training schemes, and to develop specific measures, in particular as regards training, for occupations where women are under represented. It acknowledges that the need for well-targeted vocational training measures has been heightened by the fact that the structural crisis on the labour market and the introduction of the new technologies have seriously affected women's employment prospects. Despite efforts to remedy the situation within Member States, at Community level, and the European Social Fund contributes to the financing of vocational training operations, it concedes that more remains to be done. In particular, it suggests to Member States a number of specific comprehensive actions in a variety of fields in order to develop appropriate vocational training for women. For instance, measures to:

1. integrate training for women within a broader process of cooperation between all the parties concerned in education, training and labour market organisations, equal opportunities organizations, undertakings, women's groups or associations at central, regional or local level;
2. staff the guidance, training and placement services with persons qualified to deal with the specific problems of women;
3. reorganize the school, university and vocational guidance services in such a way that they seek out rather than wait to be approached by the people concerned;
4. encourage the participation of women and girls in training courses by providing more decentralized and more widely distributed education and training facilities;
5. develop awareness and information measures so as to offer women and those around them images of women engaged in non-traditional activities, particularly those related to occupations of the future;
6. encourage the participation of girls in higher education, particularly in technical and technological fields, by:
   • making provision within the grants system for ways of compensating for the double sexual and social handicap borne by girls from underprivileged backgrounds,
   • adopting measures enabling girls to benefit on an equal footing from the programmes set up in the context of the links to be developed between universities and industry (in particular the COMETT programme) and from inter-university agreements promoting the mobility of students (particularly the ERASMUS programme),
   • making efforts to steer girls towards key areas of new technology;
7. encourage greater participation by girls in the various initial vocational training systems outside the education system, especially apprenticeships, other than those teaching certain 'female' occupations and adapt or, where appropriate, abolish types of training for women which do not provide real occupational skills or lead girls into overcrowded occupations;
8. encourage girls and women to set up their own businesses or cooperatives by introducing special training and further training schemes particularly designed to provide:
   • training in financial management,
   • information on access to back-up and financial facilities;
9. develop measures designed to promote the participation of women in continuous training entailing:
   • campaigns to provide information and promote awareness of the potential offered by such training,
   • measures to encourage women to follow such training courses, for example by adapting the conditions of training courses (e.g. timetables, duration and forms of training) to the specific problems of women and, where appropriate, by setting target figures, to be reviewed, particularly for sectors and occupations where women are under represented;
10. provide specific courses for certain categories of women, particularly underprivileged women and women returning to work after an interruption, particularly in the confidence-building, awareness or pre-training phases;
11. open up all types of training (particularly those intended for unemployed people) to women wishing to return to work and encourage the two sides of industry to develop 'reintegration' projects providing training likely to enable the persons in question to re-enter the firm at the level at which they left;
12. enable the spouses of self-employed workers who help with that self-employed activity to take advantage of training opportunities on the same terms as self-employed workers;
13. introduce support measures such as the provision of flexible childminding arrangements and the establishment of the appropriate social infrastructures so as to enable mothers to take part in training schemes, the introduction of financial incentives or the payment of allowances during training;
14. recognize skills acquired in running a household and looking after a family; and,
15. monitor the progress of women having taken part in training schemes, particularly in occupations where women are under-represented.

Communication on the Integration of Women in the Labour Market

The Communication acknowledges that the two important basic barriers to women’s employment are discrimination in education and poor access to vocational training. It also recognises the need to upgrade the quality of women’s working lives and thereby enable them to have equal opportunities with men as well as the need to reconcile working and family life. The Communication thus identifies three objectives:

• enabling more women to enter the labour market by facilitating their integration.
• up-grading women’s work by improving the quality of their jobs, particularly through the improvement of their education and training, the development of positive action programmes in enterprises and by protecting the dignity of women and men at work.
• reducing the barriers to the integration of women in the labour market, with special reference to the reconciliation of working and family life.

In response to these aims, the Communication has highlighted the "Community Initiative for the Promotion of Opportunities for Women in the Field of Employment and Vocational Training (NOW)". The NOW initiative was set up under the Commission decision on 18 July 1990 under the Structural Funds to promote vocational training and employment of women. The initiative offers Member States the possibility to co-finance action that will help promote women’s qualifications, as well as assist in a change in enterprise culture, to enable them to create their own enterprise or cooperatives; as well as help reintegrate women into the "regular" labour market and avoid the exclusion of women from the labour market and in the vulnerability of women’s employment. The Community will also finance additional measures to support child-care facilities and technical assistance that will further enable training and employment protection measures at regional and local level. In particular, measures eligible for aid assistance under the programme are:

• Creation of small businesses and co-operatives by women. In particular, the Community will support such measures as vocational training that will equip women with the skills to run businesses or co-operatives; aid for the creation of self-employed activities; aid for set-up services that will give women access to existing structures in order to create small and medium size enterprises, or craft activities.
• Measures concerning guidance and advice, pre-training and access to employment with a view to professional re-integration. These measures are targeted to long-term unemployed women, for women wishing to re-enter the labour market after a long interruption and for young women with no qualifications.
• Complementary measures. These measures concern in particular child-care provisions and technical assistance. The latter involves aid for the creation of support structures, such as networks of transitional partnerships, technical assistance for the implementation of NOW partnerships; awareness raising actions; follow-up and evaluation of vocational training or employment measures; and, the transfer of experience from local and national level to Community level, such as the training of trainers and those responsible for negotiating on training within enterprises.

Index ¦ e.quality@work