Equal Futures Partnership (Women Empowerment): Ministerial High Level Panel

Vesna Pusić, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Croatia - can you elaborate on what Croatia is doing to increase women's leadership in male-dominated institutions or traditionally male-dominated fields such as defence, foreign affairs or judicial system? What is the Croatian government doing to improve the gender balance in economic decision making?

Thank you very much, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to report a little on what we have done and especially on what we haven’t done. I came to my ministry a little less than three years ago, and I knew that I wanted to introduce changes and start doing things in a different way and I knew that I needed a good and strong team. I wasn't looking specifically for women; I was looking for the best and the brightest. My immediate team is now made up of ten people. Four of them are men and six of them are women. It's actually very close to three/seven, but then I had to be conscious of gender equality. It's four/six. This is because they were the best. Over 50% of diplomats in leading positions in the ministry are women, but only 20% of ambassadors are women. So there is a lot more that we have to do even within this ministry.

However, these women that came into the top team of the ministry have really real revamped the whole way we do things, the intensity with which we do things. I never thought of the fact that the majority of people in the immediate team were women as a cause for the fact we chose women and girls as our focus for our development aid, but actually everything we do in development is focused on women and girls because it makes more sense. We are a poor country comparatively, we don’t have much money for development aid, so we have to produce the biggest effect with the least money, and this is why we are also focusing on women and girls, because there you can make a lot of impact on the entire community.

In Croatia, 59% of university graduates are women and 54.6% of PhDs are women. We got –almost through trick – our first woman general, because we got a position in ISAF specifically for women, for the monitoring of gender issues and aspects of ISAF. But in order to get this position, you needed a woman with the rank of a general. So we “pushed” her into rank of the general, so it’s the first Brigadier General that we have that is a woman (in accordance with Croatian Law on Service in Armed Forces, she has been promoted to the temporary rank of Brigadier General until the regular promotion). We’ve also had women who were ministers of foreign affairs, obviously, but the ministry of defence, ministry of construction, ministry of finance are traditional male-dominated ministries. So there is progress, there is no doubt, but that has not really decreased family violence, this has not changed the numbers where 95-98% victims of family violence are women.

Out of eleven of our European MPs which we elected last summer five are women, so nearly 50% are women. But the thing is there is more to it. These are all precondition, not the results. There are preconditions to actually attack stereotypes and traditional approaches in every society. And with all the ministerial positions and woman generals and everything, you still have the general understanding that, for instance, family violence is something that happens in the family, that’s supposed to be something that happens in the private sphere. There is no such thing as private violence. You can have your private life, but you can’t get beat up privately. This is a public issue and ties in with the number of issues we have been discussing here at different side events in New York.

Children… girls in forced marriages, all kinds of economic deprivation… It ties in with these issues that we are discussing here, it ties in with the issue of equal partnership, and it’s not over once you can show a few ministers, a few generals… even 50% of you parliament. This is only the beginning and I think that it’s important that we don't get over-satisfied with ourselves when we see good numbers, because it actually has to go into the society, into the family, into the everyday attitudes, and only then it starts making sense and it becomes what the whole point is, and this is a real partnership. Thank you.

Thank you very much. You have indeed highlighted very important connection between economic empowerment, political empowerment, and ending violence against women. You have also highlighted very rightly why it is important to have role models both in the economic arena, in the companies and in the political space to change perceptions of women and promote gender equality. Social norms and stereotypes need to be also addressed and changed in a very deliberate way. Thank you very much for your observations and sharing of your experience, including in the context of the Foreign Ministry.