Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-02-Speech-4-060"
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"en.20000302.4.4-060"2
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"As International Women’s Day rapidly approaches, I would like to reiterate my support for the action undertaken within the Institutions and the Member States with a view to promoting women’s access to positions of responsibility, particularly in politics. That is why I shall most decidedly be voting in favour of the text of this resolution which urges us to take more proactive measures to combat the residual discrimination preventing women occupying their rightful place in our society!
Since 1995, promoting women in the decision-making process has been one of the priority areas of the European Union action programme for equal opportunities, and is included among the commitments reiterated both by the Union institutions and by the Member States when they discuss equality between men and women.
Nonetheless, even though progress has been made in recent years thanks to strategies such as mainstreaming and complementary schemes such as positive action, they are still too few in number to be satisfactory. Under-representation of women in politics, for example, continues to be the norm.
The importance of enabling greater numbers of women to become involved in politics is, however, recognised. Only women are in a position to come up with policies likely to change structures which have been developed by men for men. For, whether in politics or in the labour market, structural discrimination is the main problem facing women.
It is thus up to the European political parties to make themselves more accessible to women. Moreover, Article 191 of the Treaty (ex Article 138a) stresses, political parties are, I quote, “important as a factor for integration within the Union”. This article goes on to state that “they contribute to forming a European awareness and to expressing the political will of the citizens of the Union”. A condition of this type may have no legal value, but it is nonetheless of great symbolic value. It gives political parties an important role in building a democratic Europe. This may, for example, involve implementing positive action and promoting parity within our political parties. In the 1999 European elections some parties did put forward lists with men and women equally represented. This is an example of good practice which should be applied more widely. I do not know if there is some cause-and-effect at work here, but the fact is that the proportion of female Members in the European Parliament went from 25.7% in 1994 to 29.9% in 1999. Moreover, this Parliament has had a woman president since the 1999 elections.
I shall conclude by repeating the conclusions of the conference organised by the Commission in April 1999 entitled “Women and men in power”. Equality between men and women is not a problem that affects women alone, but one that affects our entire society!"@en1
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