UNU-GEST present at the 1st Asia-Europe Conference on Women’s Economic Empowerment in Lithuania

UNU-GEST Project Assistant Laura Malinauskaite attended the first Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Conference “Women's Economic Empowerment: Creating Equal Opportunities in the World of Work”, which was held on May 25-26 in Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Conference (hence the name) focused on different aspects of women’s economic empowerment and was attended by representatives of governments from Asian and European countries, entrepreneurship and technology “gurus” as well as prominent figures from international organisations, including UN Women, the World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Institute on Gender Equality (EIGE) and others. The conference provided a platform for a fruitful dialogue between policy-makers, public and private sectors, innovators, entrepreneurs, gender equality advocates and research institutions.

The conference focused on: economic benefits of gender equality and costs of inequalities; successful policies and legal provisions enabling women’s economic empowerment; institutional mechanisms that ensure gender equality and reduce gender gaps in political, economic, corporate and public life; women leaders and achievers that empower other women; work/life reconciliation policies and initiatives; new technologies enabling gender equality; sharing of unpaid work at home; ways to address occupational segregation and advance education for women, including financial literacy and incentives to choose “non-traditional” spheres, e.g. IT for women and nursing, care and teaching for men. The conference resulted in the Vilnius Declaration of the 1st ASEM Conference on Women’s Economic Empowerment that can be found on the conference website. The Declaration signed by the participants reaffirms their commitment to creating equal economic opportunities for women and men at work and sets out the further steps for doing so.