ILO Workshop Outlines Major Points of Joint Roadmap to the Strengthening of Women's Leadership in Social Parties
26 March 2024
The International Labour Organization (ILO) Turkey Office held a three-day workshop for social partners in Bolu on 19-22 February 2024, during which the outline of a common position paper was drawn up aimed at increasing the number of women employed by the social partners and the representation of women in decision-making mechanisms.
Throughout the workshop, hosted within the scope of the "More and Better Jobs for Women" Programme being implemented by the ILO Office for Türkiye with Swedish financial support, focus was on women's leadership, participatory gender equality analyses and social dialogue.
The Women's Leadership session, in which the aim was to strengthen the representation and leadership of women in social partnerships, yielded important outputs, and included a presentation by Dr. Seyhan Erdoğdu, who has been working on the issue within the scope of the Programme, as well group works carried out under the coordination of Gender Analyst Dr. Ayşe Emel Akalın.
Quotas for women's leadership, training and CLA practices
The representatives of workers' and employers' organizations in attendance presented their proposed contributions to the joint opinion text that had been agreed upon earlier, including the following suggestions targeting an increase in the number of women in trade union structures and their involvement in decision-making mechanisms:
- Implementation of the quota system
- Establishment of units sensitive to gender equality
- Implementation of social projects that remove the burden of care from women
- Developing gender equality-oriented strategies, planning training, and incorporating the two into the training plans of the unions
- Ensuring the issues of women's representation and leadership are addressed in organizational statutes
- Including quotas for women in union statutes and collective labour agreements for management and representation bodies
- Conducting monitoring and evaluation studies
- Ensuring the representation of women in collective bargaining negotiations
It is planned to finalize the joint opinion text in line with the offered suggestions in the future.
Examples of good practice from confederations and trade unions
In the second part of the workshop, which was moderated by the TÜRK-İŞ, HAK-İŞ, DİSK and TİSK confederations, the social partners made presentations on the works carried out in their institutions related to gender equality.
To this end, information was provided by the TÜRK-İŞ, HAK-İŞ, DİSK and TİSK confederation representatives, and by representatives of the trade unions affiliated with these confederations operating in trade, office, metal, education, textile, food, cooperative, general services and fine arts sectors, on the work carried out in their respective organizations related to gender equality in line with the ILO activities.
The ILO Office for Türkiye carried out a “Participatory Gender Equality Analysis” for social partners between 2019 and 2020, after which the social partners prepared a roadmap for the work to be carried out in support of gender equality in their organizations. Following on from this, the confederation and trade union representatives made presentations on the progress made in line with the roadmap, and exchanged opinions of what can be done to further the issue.
In the final session of the workshop in which the focus was on social dialogue, Dr. Seyhan Erdoğdu made a presentation on the “More and Better Jobs for Women through Social Dialogue Digital Training Module” offered by ILO Academy – the distance learning platform of the ILO Office for Türkiye – and the participants shared their views on how to make the trainings provided by ILO Academy more effective for the social partners.