Young girls must be able to see women working in traditionally male sectors if gender equality is to be achieved, the Citizens Assembly heard today.
And former Room To Improve host Lisa O’Brien said women working in male-dominated industries must “show up” for themselves.
The celebrity quantity surveyor - who presented RTE’s Room to Improve alongside architect Dermot Bannon - Saturday outlined her experience working in a male-dominated environment.
She was speaking to the Citizens Assembly on Gender Equality, which is holding its first hearings this weekend at the Grand Hotel in Malahide, Co Dublin.
Ms O’Brien said that women may not be able to control what colleagues think but “we can control how we show up”.
The assembly, which is made up of chairwoman Dr Catherine Day and 99 citizens, also heard from a number of other speakers, who discussed gender inequalities in education, employment, childcare and the law.
Dr Anne-Marie McGauran, from Trinity College Dublin, spoke about recent legislative changes that support gender equality, while Prof Sheila Greene, also from Trinity, spoke about gender stereotypes.
Elaine O’Mahoney, from the Central Statistics Office, presented statistics on gender, focusing on the gender employment and pay gap, as well as unpaid caring work that is often carried out by women.
She said the employment rate for men was 11% points higher than for women last year.
Meanwhile, the gender pay gap had risen from 13.9% in 2015 to 14.4% in 2017.
Later, Prof Linda Connolly from Maynooth University spoke about the evolution of the Irish family, while Prof Siobhan Mullally from NUI Galway spoke about the family in the Constitution and Irish Law.
Over the coming months, the assembly will hold weekend hearings addressing the topics of caring, gender equality in the workplace and representation in the public sphere, before concluding in July.
This assembly was established in July 2019 to bring forward proposals to the Houses of the Oireachtas to advance gender equality.
Previous assemblies have considered the Eighth Amendment, population aging and climate change, amongst other matters.
Members of the public can follow this Citizens Assembly as it continues its meetings today (SUN) by going online to the assembly’s website or to Twitter.
