Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-08-Speech-1-090"
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"en.20040308.7.1-090"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this House’s celebration of International Women’s Day should not be a burdensome duty. I would have preferred us to adopt – much more frequently in the course of a year, rather than just on this day – reports on the Commission’s legislative initiatives, rather than own-initiative reports on topics such as the situation of women who belong to minorities or the reconciliation of professional, family and private life, which, interesting though they may be, do regrettably little to get us further forward in practical terms.
One can certainly, in these areas; keep making new demands – some of them, alas, exaggerated – but extreme and sometimes unrealistic demands do nothing to help the women we want to help. On the contrary, they can turn out to militate against the employment of women. My lady colleagues and I had ourselves submitted amendments to these own-initiative reports, only – as we are accustomed to doing – to see them fail in the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, and that is why we have resubmitted some of them to be voted on.
What I would like to say in this debate is that I am not very happy about the oral questions to the Commission and the Council. I am not in the least convinced that there is a need for one member of the Commission, and one Directorate-General, to have sole responsibility for the equal treatment of men and women. It would, I think, be much better for these problems to be dealt with by a Commissioner – of whichever gender – whose remit included such things as, for example, the internal market or employment policy, rather than setting them apart in a ghetto in which they would suffer the same fate as this House’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, that of not being taken seriously by many decision-makers.
As regards the composition of the Commission, I do not think that the questions to the Council aimed at ensuring that there should be enough women Commissioners, are actually very much help at this present time. How is the Council – which, incidentally, I do not believe is actually represented at the moment – supposed to lay down, on 1 March, that at least one-third of the Commissioners should be women after November 2004? I hope there will be more of them than that. Even if a proposal of this sort is in the draft constitutional treaty, I think it is absurd that every Member State should be required to put forward a list of three candidates, be they male or female. This sort of selection procedure does nothing whatever to ensure that the next Commission will include the best male Commissioners and enough outstanding female ones."@en1
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