20
May
2026
Watch
Advancing towards a care society: addressing the gender care gap (debate)
Mr President, first of all, dear Commissioner, you have noticed that basically all women have spoken in this debate, except for three courageous colleagues, and except for, for a short time, a colleague of ours whose question was really not so clear to me. But, in any case, until you know that the issue of caregiving, and the gender gap relating to that, is only a topic discussed by women, and not an utmost priority in the policy agenda of political institutions, we will have a problem. We will have a problem. Because the second issue is that we know, of course, the statistics. So the diagnosis is very clear. We have more than 50 million people providing informal, unrecognised care. But now it is time to act. So first of all, we have to implement the Directive on work-life balance, and we have to target the next European budget for the gender gap in caregiving.