New mechanisms to guarantee equality: municipal gender equity regulation updated
The Full Council has definitively approved the changes to Barcelona City Council’s gender equity regulation. The input and amendments included in the document will allow the gender perspective to steadily gain importance in municipal mechanisms and administrative processes. The regulation came into force in 2019, the goal being to establish the principles and mechanisms which govern the City Council when it comes to correcting inequalities between men and women, in the city and also within the municipal structure.
The main change is the increase in mechanisms to guarantee gender parity among municipal bodies. In particular, this means the obligation to guarantee parity in the management of dependent bodies or those linked to the City Council. This obligation only applied to municipal government bodies until now.
Measures in other spheres include urban planning, with specific guidelines for those drafting urban planning projects and the introduction of the obligation to conduct gender impact assessments. Minor amendments have also been introduced to strengthen the monitoring commission, facilitating its task and making it more agile.
The plan is also for the monitoring reports for the regulation now to be carried out annually rather than every four years.
The amendment process was submitted to two public scrutiny processes to ensure that members of the public and political parties could give all the input they considered necessary.
