On the occasion of International Women’s Day, AGE calls for a greater awareness and attention to be paid to advancing older women’s right to equality in all spheres of their lives, in particular in employment and in their access to health care.

Few Member States adequately address the particular concerns of older women and changes are necessary to the economic, social and political structures to ensure true equality of opportunity for older women in the labour market and in accessing fundamental goods, facilities and services such as insurance products and healthcare.

Enhance older women’s rights in the labour market and ensure a better life-work balance

European labour markets are not sufficiently responsive to the challenges of gender parity in the context of globalisation and an ageing society. Older female workers are the group whose employment rate has increased most significantly (reaching 34.8%, a 7.4 percentage increase on 2000) but this is still far below the Lisbon target of 50% for older workers.

Older women are the group which can bring significant gain to both the workplace and society. For this to be realised, measures must be put in place to help women achieve a greater parity in their working lives and to better reconcile their work and family responsibilities. AGE therefore calls for a new type of leave to allow older working women leave to care for their dependant family members.

Facilitate older women’s access to health care

AGE deplores the pervasive discrimination that older women face in access to health resources and calls for age limits in access to health care to be removed, for instance in breast cancer screening. AGE believes that patients must be treated according to their needs and the potential benefit they will draw from the treatment, within the limits of resources available, rather than according to their chronological age or gender.

AGE welcomes the platform that International Women’s Day brings to raising awareness of women’s rights and wishes to take this opportunity to ensure that the voice of older women is heard.