Good afternoon.
As Carine has just mentioned, the act provided for the creation of a gender test, that is to say, an assessment of the impact of bills and draft regulations on the respective situations of women and men. At the federal level, other ex ante tests already exist and others were being prepared. Negotiations ensued and resulted in the establishment of a regulatory impact analysis. This analysis includes several components, including one that focuses on the equality of women and men.
This instrument is called RIA, or regulatory impact analysis. It is mandatory for all files submitted to the council of ministers. That said, the executive branch remains entirely free to accept or ignore the findings of the analysis. The purpose of this impact analysis, which is conducted by the regulators themselves, is to stimulate reflection. The goal is actually to get them to internalize the habit of reflecting on the impact of the regulatory proposals they put forward with respect to the situations of women and men.
Specifically, there are a series of open questions on the person in question and on the differences between men and women. The objective is ensuring that regulators have a clear idea of the respective situations of men and women in the area covered by the draft regulations, so they can then evaluate the impact of their proposal on the situations of women and men.
The law under which this impact assessment was created also mandated the establishment of a committee. The committee is composed of representatives of the five administrations touched by the various aspects of the impact analysis. This committee can offer advice if regulators wish to be advised on the quality of the analyses they performed. It also prepares a report analyzing in some way the quality of responses to questions posed as part of the analysis.
The findings of the first report prepared on the RIA as a whole are not very positive. Indeed, the RIA has not yet been truly integrated in the Belgian federal decision making process. The finding was that people spend relatively little time on it and tend to conduct the analysis at the end of the process. Ideally, the impact analysis should be performed as early as possible as part of the reflection leading to the adoption of draft legislation.
Therefore, the regulators and political and administrative officials have not yet—