EU’s Margrethe Vestager regretted on Monday, March 8, the lack of women in the bodies in charge of making decisions to manage the coronavirus pandemic.
The pandemic “affects women everywhere, but you don’t see many women represented when it comes to decisions on how to manage the pandemic,” Danish politician stated during an interview with Politico.
In what she described as a “paradox” that the majority of front-line workers are women and that, however, “when looking at the coronavirus committees, coordinating bodies, in many countries, the vast majority do not have parity of gender or are led by men.”
Vestager also believes there is a “quite large” risk that the pandemic causes a setback in equality between men and women. “Given that progress is so slow, when something terrible like the pandemic happens, of course, the setback is felt strongly,” she said, and gave as an example the increase in unemployment among women due to the crisis or that “many more women are experiencing domestic violence and abuse. “
Margrethe Vestager currently belongs to the first joint European Commission (thirteen women and fourteen men) in history, an achievement that Danish politics attributed to the President of the Executive, Ursula von der Leyen, who asked the Member States to present two candidates to commissioner, one of each sex.
