Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-300"
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"en.20020924.13.2-300"2
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"Mr President, the most striking statistic I have heard tonight is the one from the Commissioner when she indicated that it would take 2 500 years for us to reach a position of equality for women if we continue at the same pace. I wonder how much faster we need to move in order to achieve this equality within the next hundred years, which even then would be quite a long period to have to wait.
It strikes me that while we talk consistently, and correctly, about the need to create equal opportunities in the European Union that in a very real sense that is a secondary objective to treating people with equality, because there is a distinct difference between the question of equality for every single human being and the idea that they should also have equal opportunities. Without equality there can be no equal opportunity and that has to be fundamental to our approach to this issue of women participating in decision-making.
One of the issues that must be addressed if we are to ensure that women – and in particular working women – can participate and that they get time off work in order to pursue trade union activities, is that of employers being extremely reluctant to allow workers to have time off to pursue either training or trade union activities. This is increasingly the case, even before one deals with the question of allowing either men or women time off to have babies or to look after children. I am not surprised by the statistic which indicates that there has been a decline in the number of women participating in employers' organisations.
The only slight criticism I would have of some of the statistics in the report is that they are out of date. That is not the fault of the rapporteur, it is down to the fact that we do not have consistent and systematic collection of proper data.
One of the keys to making progress in this area is to have affirmative programmes, action plans and targets. Critical to it also is a programme of sensitising people in trade unions and in employers' organisations to the fact that there is another half of the human race who are entitled to equality as of right and not just as a privilege."@en1
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