Contribution of the Common Agricultural Policy to equality between women and men

The annual funding of the CAP Strategic Plan comprises around six billion euros. Women benefit less from these funds than men. There are initial efforts to change this, but there is still a long way to go.

Other measures under the second pillar support, for example, municipalities and associations in im-proving the apperarance of the villages, creating social meeting places and leisure activities or strengthening rural tourism.As women are less often members of local councils than men, their perspective is often under-represented in funding decisions. Women are often not specifically included in the planning of such projects, as previous evaluations have shown.

A central funding measure in this area is village development, which is funded by the CAP strategic plan, but also by federal and state funds. In Hesse, a local steering group accompanies village devel-opment in each of the municipalities selected as funding priorities. The steering group consists of representatives of the municipality, political committees and local actors and makes recommenda-tions on which village development projects should be funded. However, in the previous funding period (2014 – 2022), on average less than a third of the members of the steering groups were women. The results of the 5-state evaluation from other federal states confirm this frame-work.

In order to support women and men equally with the CAP Strategic Plan, funding measures are needed that specifically support women or reduce existing disadvantages for women. Funding measures could be designed in a way that they consider the interests of women and men equally. For example, projects by women could be given more weight in the selection process or guidelines for gender-responsive village development and planning of specific projects such as meeting places or leisure activities could be offered. 

Great potential for improved equality

Based on the results of previous evaluations and the study on the living situation of women on farms, researchers at the Thünen Institute have analysed the support measures of the CAP Strategic Plan and classified their potential contribution to gender equality. They have identified some positive starting points, which, however, are rarely used by the federal states when designing support measures:
 

• The German CAP Strategic Plan contains only one funding measure that exclusively supports wom-en, namely the "Innovative Measures for Women in Rural Areas" in Baden-Württemberg. This fund-ing programme helps to reduce structural disadvantages by promoting innovative business start-ups and expansions by women as well as supporting qualifications and coaching. It has already been successfully implemented for several EU funding periods.
• In Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, for exam-ple, there are requirements for the composition of Local Action Groups in LEADER regions. These stipulate that at least one third of the voting members must be women.
• In some cases, preference is given to projects that contribute to equality between women and men. In the case of the "settlement grant for young farmers", projects by women are given pref-erence over those of men in the federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, provided the assessment is otherwise the same.

Despite the first steps taken in the CAP Strategic Plan, there is still much to be done to improve gender equality. Only a very small proportion of funding is used for support measures that provide a direct impetus for gender equality in rural areas (2.8 percent) or have a clear potential to do so (4.8 percent). Nearly 70 percent of funds are planned for funding measures that perpetuate the existing structural inequalities, particularly in agriculture.