Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-18-Speech-4-042"
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Mr President, I should like to congratulate Mrs Karamanou on her excellent presentation of the situation in Europe as regards equality of the sexes and on her ordered approach to proposals and solutions. I am sorry that the spokesman for the PPE who expressed the greatest opposition to the report has left because the debate would have been highly interesting.
Allow me to start by making a political observation. The title of the report: “The balanced participation of women and men in the decision-making process” has a dual meaning. The decision-making process takes place in the centres of power; but it also means balanced participation in the most important decision-making process for the future, which takes place in the family. So it refers to both sexes and the numbers of women in decision-making centres cannot be increased unless the proportion of time which men spend on family matters is also increased. This automatically means that if we want to achieve the required target, we need to make changes to the family, society, the economy and the cultural identity which we have had for centuries.
The debate revolved largely around whether or not quotas, i.e. a quantitative commitment on participation, was an acceptable solution. I would say, from a philosophical point of view, that a set of numbers or rules can never change a social fact of life. However, history shows that rules and targets can bring about change, especially if they are accompanied by a set of policies. So what we need to do, and this is clearly expressed in Mrs Karamanou's report, is to implement three types of policy simultaneously if we are to achieve this important objective, which concerns democracy in our societies.
The first type of policy is mainstreaming equal opportunities in the economy and employment, in social systems and social protection and in education systems and the cultural identity of our societies. The second type of policy concerns specific measures and specific positive action to support the policy of participation in the decision-making process. These measures relate to electoral systems, where it has been proven that there is a close correlation between electoral systems and the participation of women, they relate to the need for continuous statistics which throw the facts into relief, they relate, of course to political parties and their internal political commitments and they relate to laws for positive action. Excellent examples have been cited in this Chamber, which prove that wherever quotas have been applied in conjunction with all the policies which I have just mentioned, they have had positive results. And we cannot ignore the fact that the only countries which have made any serious headway with the participation of women are the countries which had applied specific policies. Not always with legislative undertakings on quotas but with political undertakings by the political parties and always with specific quantitative targets.
Finally, there is a third type of policy which relates to intervention by the European Union and collaboration on the part of the Member States, such as political networks of women, indicators at European level – I refer to the Finnish Presidency and the 9 indicators, the application of which could create national undertakings and national targets – benchmarking, training and, finally, support for women in the national states and on the European political scene with an important international role, because this is what creates the standards for power and the standards for women politicians for later generations.
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I shall close by repeating what the Prime Minister of Luxembourg said when the question of whether or not there should be specific targets for employment in the Member States was being debated: ‘The expression of political desire, the expression of political intention is not enough. Policy without specific quantitative targets and means is simply literature.’"@en1
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