Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-29-Speech-1-116"
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"en.20040329.12.1-116"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members of the European Parliament, the European Union has been fighting for equal treatment of men and women for nearly fifty years now and it has made a great deal of progress in the employment sector, with the introduction of legislation to safeguard equal pay and equal working conditions.
Of course, legislation cannot resolve all the problems and a great deal still needs to be done in order to wipe out pay differentials between men and women. In 2000, the Commission announced in the social policy agenda that it would examine discrimination outside the labour market. This idea was supported by the European Council in Nice, which called on the Commission to strengthen rights relating to equality by approving a proposal for a directive on the basis of Article 13 of the Treaty.
Before a detailed proposal was drafted, broad consultations were held with the Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Men and Women, on which all the Members States and the social partners are represented, together with the insurance and other sectors, the European Parliament and civil society.
You have this proposal before you. Following the example of the earlier directive on ethnic discrimination, the present directive focuses on the basic sector of access to goods and services, where there was evidence of unequal treatment of men and women and where it is known that legislation can change the situation. Consequently, the present directive will mainly cover financial services which often require women to have a guarantor in order to obtain a loan, but not men. Similarly housing, where single parent families, mainly women, face greater difficulties than men in renting accommodation and, of course, the insurance sector, mainly the car insurance, life assurance and pension sectors, as well as health insurance.
The proposal to ban discrimination between men and women with regard to access to goods and services is equivocal to the Council, Parliament and society in general. It is equivocal because it questions established ideas in relation to the treatment of men and women, because it maintains that there are factors more important than gender when calculating premiums and because it implies that the approach which most insurance companies use today is basically unfair.
This is, however, an important step for the principle of equal treatment and it will change the lives of both men and women throughout the whole of the European Union."@en1
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