The roundtable entitled Gender policies in the context of the forthcoming elections and EU membership, organized by the Center for Women’s Studies, was held in Novinarski dom on October 25, 2011.

The roundtable was part of the project AD ACTE – Anti-Discrimination ACtions Towards Equality of women and men, which the Center is implementing in partnership with the CEE Network for Gender Issues from Slovenia and in collaboration with the Serbian National Council, with financial support from the EU.

After an introduction from Rada Borić, executive director of the Center for Women’s Studies, the main topic of discussion was the representation of gender policies in pre-election programs, along with gender policy experiences of the EU member countries. Sonja Lokar, president of the CEE Network, shared her Slovenian experiences, and Astrid Thors, Swedish People’s Party representative in the Finnish Parliament, and also a longtime European Parliament representative and until recently the Minister of Migration and European Affairs in the Finnish government, spoke of the necessity of transpartisan cooperation between women politicians. Josip Šipić from the Economic Institute in Zagreb spoke about the right-wing parties’ politics of motherhood, and Tatjana Broz from the NGO CESI offered a gender analysis of the pre-election political parties’ programs. Political party representatives Ana Lovrin, president of the Justice Committee of the Croatian Parliament’s and Gordana Sobol, president of the Gender Equality Committee of the Croatian Parliament, spoke about the representation of gender policies in their parties’ programs. The event was moderated by Marjeta Šinko, an assistant at the Faculty of Political Science and a member of the Center for Women’s Studies.