Analysis of gender quotas implementation for women empowerment: EU and Republic of Moldova’s experience

Abstract

Promoting gender equality and women empowerment has been one of the Millennium Development Goals of United Nations that nearly all world countries committed to achieve by 2015, including EU countries and Republic of Moldova. The slow progress towards this goal made it remain part of the UN agenda for the next 15 years. Due to that, it became necessary to analyze how an instrument like gender quotas can be used as some sort of last resort in this context in EU countries and in the Republic of Moldova. The purpose of the research is to analyze the experience of EU countries and Republic of Moldova on gender quotas as a tool for women empowerment and to see the opinions of employers and employees from Moldova on gender quotas. The research methods applied in the research include: legal analysis, induction and statistical analysis. The results of the survey on the opinions on gender quotas have shown that the views on gender quotas are mostly negative. Employers, even though recognizing their potential utility, have a pronounced reticence towards them, while opinions of employees were divided: some were optimistic and supported the idea, while others were sceptical that gender quotas have some potential for women empowerment and others pointed to other areas, like education, towards which more attention is needed for women empowerment.