The empowerment of women around the world is one of the most remarkable revolutions of recent decades: millions of people who once depended on men have taken control of their own economic destinies.

Today, women make up the majority of professional workers in many countries. In the European Union alone, women have filled 6 out of the 8 million new jobs created since 2000.

Despite the general trend towards greater equality in society and in the labor market, progress remains slow and important differences still persist between men and women. Only 21% of the board members of the 620 largest companies in Europe in 2015 were women, and a recent study in Spain shows that 82% of the management positions and 68% of the middle management in our The country is still dominated by male professionals.

Following in the footsteps of the Strategic Engagement for Gender Equality 2016-2019 adopted by the European Commission in 2015, the 'Women in Power' project aims to become a tool to support equality and gender balance in European boards of directors, providing women working in the traditional sectors (footwear, textile and furniture) the opportunity to acquire skills and competencies that improve their sectoral and managerial skills, thus promoting gender equality and the advancement of women in society European

'Women in Power' also wants to facilitate participation and access to education through a free online training available in several languages ​​that will be specially designed to accommodate the training needs of a group of women who often have little secondary and tertiary education, but who have a deep knowledge about the industries in which they work.

To this end, the coordinating organization of this project, AMUEBLA, has brought together a consortium of seven European organizations specialized in sectoral and gender based projects that will contribute to spark the debate on women and leadership in traditional industries, as well as the need to educate women towards professional empowerment.

In addition to AMUEBLA, the organizations that will participate in this project are Campus Iberus Consortium of Spain, the Association of Women Directors of Malta (WDM), the Youth Career & Advising Center (JKC) of the Vytautas Magnus University of Lithuania, Inova Consultancy United Kingdom, the Furniture Cluster and InnovationHabitat Center (CENFIM) of Spain and the Romanian Textile Concept Cluster (RTxC).

This project has an expected duration of two years and has a € 299,000 budget funded by the European Commission through the Erasmus + program, which aims to improve the quality of education in Europe.