Towards Equality

Regarding the initiative 7.2 – Plans for Equality, financed by POPH – Operation Program of Human Potential and by CIG – Commission for Citizenship and Genre Equality, AMOG developed the project “Towards Equality”.

To promote genre equality, the project adopts a perspective of awareness for social responsibility in organizations by adopting nondiscriminatory measures based on genre.

The equality between men and women is a fundamental right, a common value in national and European policies and a necessary condition for the concretization of national and communitarian goals, regarding growth, employment and social cohesion.

Thus, Towards Equality was aimed to mobilize companies in Algarve region for the Implementation of Plans for Equality through the reinforcement and integration of genre perspective in its labor policies and in the entity of the regional business sector.

The project presents as main objectives:

• Diagnosis of the situation in terms of equality policies;
• Promote the dissemination of strategies for conciliation between professional, familiar and personal life;
• Promote the change of behavior and development of competences of genre cooperation;
• Promote actions of awareness on a regional level about the importance of the principle of equality between women and men in accessing employment, career progression and access to decision places;
• Develop a computerized information network about equality policies.

The team of the project outlined an action strategy focused on organizational change that contemplates the following activities:

Diagnosis – to identify and characterize good practices, weaknesses or improvement areas for the implementation/reinforcement of good practices in genre equality domain, conciliation of professional life with personal and familiar life and protection of maternity and paternity.

Forum/Blog- to create a computerized information network and theme discussion on genre equality in labor market. In this space, it was created a depository of information regarding good practices, training and awareness actions and data about the project execution.

Training – to develop several training and awareness actions about themes such as the explanation of genre systems, mechanisms of segregation of the labor market and private sphere. In this matter, there were the following actions: “Right to Equality and nondiscrimination”; “Equality of opportunities between Women and Men”; “Equality of Opportunities”; “Citizenship and Globalization”; “Social Law”; “Professional Ethics and Deontology”.

Plan for Equality – to proceed to the conception and implementation of a Plan for Equality in each participant company as well as in AMOG, focusing among other aspects, in the clear and explicit incorporation of genre equality policy in the mission and organization strategy.

Evaluation of impacts – to ensure the sustainability of the project beyond its conclusion date, as well as the evaluation of effective improvements experienced in participant companies, on a genre equality level in the workplace, in the access to information and in the implementation of strategies for conciliation of professional and familiar life.

We are going towards equality when we assume that Genre Equality is something built knowing, training, enabling and implementing plans for equality.