On the 13th of March, rEUsilience project joint co-ordinator Rense Nieuwenhuis participated in a parallel event to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), organised by the United Nations in New York from the 10th – 21st of March 2025. This annual CSW-event is the UN’s key body for promoting gender equality and this year’s sixty-ninth session is particularly significant since it focused on the review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action that was adopted 30 years ago, in 1995. The aim of the review is to assess the current challenges that affect the implementation of the Platform for Action, the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Nieuwenhuis contributed to the parallel NGO-led conference during the ‘Leave No Single Mother Behind’ event, organised by the Dutch NGO ‘Single SuperMom’ together with the international NGO ‘Make Mothers Matter-MMM’ and Maria Stern from ‘Thanks Day’. There was a large attendance of single mothers and representatives of NGOs for single mothers from around the world in the event. In his presentation, Nieuwenhuis brought to the forefront that single mothers are almost completely absent in the ongoing evaluations of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a high-level report to the Commission on the Status of Women, mentioning single mothers only twice. Nieuwenhuis explained that, while single mothers are – at best – only represented in the context of a major crisis, they are often only considered as recipients of financial benefits instead of active agents and therefore not being approached as an integral part of the analysis. This entails the risk that single mothers are not adequately represented in the ensuing policy discourse and thus does not do justice to single motherhood in all its aspects, he explained. While single parenthood is becoming more prevalent in the EU – and with most single-parent households headed by mothers – he discussed that single motherhood should be an integral and explicit part of analyses of gender equality, including those related to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
Nieuwenhuis’ contribution contained multiple key findings from the rEUsilience research evidence. Firstly, besides single motherhood being gendered, Nieuwenhuis presented that single mothers are active, rather than passive recipients of income benefits. The majority of single parents are employed, and as our overview report of focus group research shows, while also providing the bulk of care-work for their children, single mothers often make tremendous efforts to manage or improve their situation, despite oftentimes lack of (coordination of) resources. In that regard, our working paper on the tax-benefit systems and their eligibility and benefit adequacy for families in the studied countries did found that cash benefits are of key importance for single mothers, but that policies which view single mothers only as passive recipients overlook the barriers that need to be removed for single mothers in order to acknowledge the efforts they are already making.
Secondly, Nieuwenhuis presented that single mothers face compounded challenges, which illustrates that single motherhood itself is often not the root cause of their disadvantage, but the fact that they regularly have less capacity to deal with multiple challenges. This layering of multiple and often intersecting inequalities has been extensively described in the overview report of the focus group interviews and in the interactive data visualiation of socio-economic risks, resources and resilience among families in Europe.
On top of this compounding of multiple risk factors and the constrains single mothers often face by gendered inequality as discussed before, Nieuwenhuis presented that single mothers are often constrained by events earlier in their life-course to improve their situation, pleading to approach single motherhood as a life-course stage, rather than a static and homogeneous group. He explained that there are transitions in and out of single motherhood, for example when becoming a single mother after a relationship dissolution but also children growing up and leaving the home or re-partnering and blending families. This has implications for policies which is why rEUsilience has advocated for family transitions requiring specific policies that contribute to the resilience and improvement of the situation of single mothers.
To conclude, Nieuwenhuis ended his presentation by advocating for ‘policy packages’ rather than single policies. These policy packages refer to the need of multiple policies that are complementary so that the compounding challenges that single mother face are being substantially improved by policies that address multiple challenges at the same time, rather than drawing out isolated policy interventions such as only providing financial support.
Listening to the voices in the audience, several participants reflected on the importance of seeing oneself represented and mentioned this was the first time they saw a parallel event at the NGO CSW conference focused on single mothers. The discussions hence also focused on the importance of being organised to change policies and to simultaneously reduce stigma. We are thankful for Nieuwenhuis’ important contribution to this parallel event and glad to see that the rEUsilience research findings could find resonance in the CSW. Additionally, Nieuwenhuis attended the NGO briefing with the Dutch State Secretary of Equal Opportunities, Mariëlle Paul, where he had the opportunity to ask what could be done to create more visibility for single mothers and diverse families in the four-year work programme which is still being negotiated. We hope that rEUsilience has therefore contributed to greater awareness of the situation of single mothers – and single parents more generally – in policies and policymaking whilst opening the discussion with the attendants on how to collectively improve and make the situation of single mothers visible.