Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-302"
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"en.20020924.13.2-302"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, the Constitution of my country solemnly states, in Article 14, that all ‘Spaniards are equal before the law, without any discrimination for reasons of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion, or any other political or social condition or circumstance’; and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, in Article 20, Chapter III, states that ‘Everyone is equal before the law’; and in Article 21 that ‘Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex,…..shall be prohibited’, and other circumstances are stipulated; and Article 23, under the heading ‘Equality between men and women’ lays down that ‘Equality between men and women must be ensured in all areas, including employment, work and pay. The principle of equality shall not prevent the maintenance or adoption of measures providing for specific advantages in favour of the under-represented sex.’
If we compare these general principles, these solemn declarations, with social reality, with the everyday world we live in, specifically in terms of the achievement of women’s equality in the field of representation amongst the European Union’s social partners, one conclusion immediately springs to mind: there is still much to do. Mrs Smet’s excellent report expresses this perfectly, and I congratulate her on her work.
Women make up approximately 40% of the members of the trade unions in the European Union, but there is no proportionality between their presence within the membership of the trade unions, on the one hand, and within the decision-making and governing bodies of the trade unions, on the other. Furthermore, women, although the data on this is rather imprecise, make up a minority in the upper levels of company organisations. Declarations of intention without commitments are not sufficient to turn the principles I have mentioned into a social reality. We therefore need strategies aimed at increasing the presence of women amongst the social partners and I believe that an artificial system of quotas is not the right or desired solution or approach.
A fairer society – in a European Union in which 42% of working people are women – cannot tolerate an under-representation of women in the bodies and structures within which social interlocutors meet to define, regulate and agree on issues relating to social policy.
Perhaps women themselves are partly responsible for the situation being analysed here. I believe that the horizontal integration of the gender dimension into the different policies, the action programmes – preferably measures to reconcile work and family life – the efforts of the social agents themselves, training and information, measures to stimulate the participation of women, positive actions and action programmes, are ways to achieve equality and this, in turn, is a means, an instrument, for building a better, fairer and more caring society through social dialogue."@en1
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