The project “Social dialogue and gender equality: Empowering education trade unions to address gender equality in the teaching profession through social dialogue” aims to provide education trade unions with concrete tools and practices to address the challenges of gender inequality through enhanced social dialogue in the education sector at national, regional and local level.

Advisory Group

  • Rosella Benedetti UIL-Scuola Italy
  • Alexandra Cornea FSLE Romania
  • Ute Foit VBE Germany
  • Gabriella Tønnesen BUPL Denmark
  • Alexandra Bojanic SNUipp France
  • Inga Puisa FLESTU Lithuania

Advisory Group

Supported by

Related topics

The ETUCE Secretariat carried out an online survey among its member organisations (69 responses from 43 countries) combined with a desk research based on ETUCE, EIGE and other studies on gender equality in the teaching profession:

  • to identify national findings related to existing career segregation in the teaching profession, with a special focus on with a special focus on sectoral segregation (e.g. feminisation of early-childhood education and masculinisation of higher education), work-life balance, career development and recognition, gender pay and pension gaps, and gender inequality in decision-making;
  • to identify and analyse the ways gender equality is addressed by education trade unions in social dialogue;
  • to collect trade unions’ good practices of tackling the gender inequality in the education sector through different forms of social dialogue;

The results of the research show that despite the teaching being a highly gendered profession, only 60% of education trade unions have a department or individuals dealing specifically with gender equality issues. Comparison of the trends between the 2009, 2014 and 2018 surveys shows that the importance and use of various mechanisms for implementing gender equality policies in the education trade unions have been decreasing across the decade, across all types of implementation mechanisms included in the surveys. Moreover, gender equality is a topic that to a large extent is not addressed in social dialogue: only 12% of measures mentioned in the survey were the result of collective bargaining between education employer and trade union organisations.

Please find the research report and executive summaries (EN, FR, RU) here.

Research Report