Scientific Expertise: Implementation of the European Social Partner Agreement on “Women in Rail” (WIR Project)

Despite national differences in the shares of men and women in the rail sector in the European countries, women are still underrepresented in this field. To promote the employment of women as well as to give women more protection and guarantee equal treatment in the rail sector the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER) and the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF) signed the “European Social Partner Agreement on ‘Women in Rail’” (in short: “WIR Agreement”).

This Agreement is as a unique approach to tackling issues inherent to the STEM sector: Strongly male-connoted employment fields, a long-term horizontal and vertical segregation and, despite individual initiatives, little movement towards increasing the share of women in the sector.

European railways should therefore implement measures in the following policy areas: Overall general gender equality policy, gender balanced representation, recruitment, reconciliating working and private life, career development, equal pay and gender pay gap, occupational health and safety and preventing sexual harassment and sexism.

The main objective of the scientific expertise is to develop data collection methods and a scope of a reporting structure to measure and illustrate the implementation and impact of the agreement. The following approaches are applied for this purpose:

• Literature and document analysis
• Qualitative Interviews with experts and stakeholders
• Development of suitable indicators
• Development of a survey tool and collection of data for the report
• Collection and processing of best practice examples
• Drafting of the first new “WIR report”

Within the framework of the current project, the research team is in regular exchange with the Steering Committee (members from CER and ETF). The scientific team of L&R Social Research is supported by Elvira González Gago as an external expert from Research4Consulting (Spain).