FEMACT – CITIES

FEMACT Cities will enable eight European cities to develop action plans for gender equality in multiple areas and public policies including education, planning, health and, of course, economic development.
The project aims to build the governance capacity of partner cities so that they, in turn, can effectively implement sustainable urban development strategies under the various cohesion policy objectives in their countries.
FEMACT Cities will need to involve all stakeholders in an inclusive and non-gender biased way: it is a social challenge that needs to be supported by the whole population in order to have a strong and broad cultural improvement.

European partners

Clermont Auvergne Métropole (France), Szabolcs Regional Development Association of Municipalities  (Hungary), Municipality of Postojna (Slovenia), Krakow (Poland), Cluj Metropolitan Area Intercommunity Development Association (Romania), Regiao de Coimbra (Portugal), Llinsstyrelsen Skane (Sweden), Municipality of Torino (Italy).

The project in Torino

The City of Torino is strongly committed to innovating and implementing the actions included in the already approved Gender Equality Plan (GEP) and creating a Gender Budget, applying equal opportunity principles both inside and outside the Administration, addressing the phenomenon of discrimination by removing obstacles that, in fact, prevent the achievement of gender quality.
In particular, the focus of the project is on the promotion of gender equality in leadership and decision-making, recruitment and career progression, organizational well-being, gender-based violence and disclosure on equal opportunity, participation in working groups, and gender mainstreaming in development activities and city policies.

In order to make the Gender Equality Plan and Gender Balance a truly operational and effective plan, it is necessary to activate a path of structural change, to deepen the applications of gender policies in different areas, to build synergies so that the cross-sectional and intersectional dimensions of discrimination are highlighted, as well as to promote a path of shared planning with stakeholders who deal with this issue in various capacities.

Practical steps

The main actions of the project are:

• the revisiting of the Gender Equality Plan (GEP), a set of provisions and actions aimed at ensuring gender equality to be understood as a tool to identify practices that may produce gender discrimination, recognize innovative strategies to overcome them, and monitor progress through the development of gender indicators;
• the creation and implementation of the Gender Balance Sheet as a valuable tool for recognizing and assessing the potentially or actually discriminatory effects of public policies towards the community. This tool can be used to monitor the administration’s action for gender equality. When correlated with appropriate evaluation indicators (with gender-disaggregated data), it will measure the effects of choices made, including economic and financial commitments, on women and men.

Numbers

• EU Contribution to the City of Torino: € 66,618.75
• Project duration: 30 months
• Partners: 8