Equal Opportunities

AER is committed to empowering its members to guarantee equal opportunities for each and every one of their citizens.

Within the AER structure, we promote gender parity in the various AER organs – this principle is promoted within the AER statutes and rules of procedure.

Across AER, we encourage regions to acknowledge and implement the equal opportunities perspective in all policy areas and we have worked on:

Gender Equality has been a key priority within AER for many years – a working group on Gender Equality was created in the late 1990s. The Standing Committee on Equal Opportunities was preceded by the AER Observatory on Gender Issues, that operated within the framework of the AER Social Policy and Public Health Committee (Committee 2). 

The AER Standing Committee on Equal Opportunities was created by a decision of the AER General Assembly on 26 November 2009.

In May 2013, the General Assembly meeting in Paris decided to end the mandate of the Standing Committee on Equal Opportunities, and to nominate an AER Vice-President in charge of Equal Opportunities, in recognition of the importance of equal opportunities within AER’s work and the need to ensure that these issues are mainstreamed across the entire organisation.

Our work on Equal Opportunities intends to cover all kinds of inequality, whether they are based on gender, ethnic or other origin, age, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or any other reason people can find to create categories among human beings.