Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-06-Speech-4-045"
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"en.20031106.3.4-045"2
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"Madam President, I am able to support what Mrs Dybkjær has said about gender equality, so I shall instead use my speaking time to talk about a genuine success where such equality is concerned.
I was elected to Parliament as a representative of an all-party movement, the June Movement, which has now operated for ten years on the principle that we should draw half of all our parliamentary candidates and half of our party’s leading members equally from both sexes. We have just recently prepared a new list of parliamentary candidates, consisting of ten women and ten men, with the vacancies divided on an alternating basis between male and female candidates.
For a long time, we had more men than we could make use of and only half the women we needed to have been elected. We therefore began searching through our membership, and we finally obtained the list we wanted and needed. The outcome would, however, have been a lopsided list if we had not adopted regulations committing ourselves to having a list divided equally between both sexes.
The outcome was that gender equality operated to the advantage of the men. Some of the women did in fact obtain more votes at the party conference than some of the men but were listed beneath men with fewer votes because, according to our rule, every other person on the list must be a woman. This outcome was not intended, but I can sincerely recommend all parties to introduce gender equality for all their lists.
Women consistently hold back, even in those countries that are most advanced in terms of gender equality. Women do not want to put themselves forward unless they feel certain of being on top of everything, ideally more so than their male colleagues. We also know this from job applications. When men apply for a job, some of the many qualifications they reel off have to be discounted. When women apply, qualifications have to be added. That is the way things are, but it is something we can counteract by requiring the same number of candidates from each sex or, as I would prefer, at least 50% women.
If, as a result, qualified men were deselected in favour of less qualified women, I should not recommend the system, but, in the case of ourselves in the June Movement, the system has operated perfectly at each election, given women the necessary helping hand and provided us with a list that better reflects the electorate. This is, then, an arrangement I should like to recommend to everyone.
We have also made a conscious effort to get young candidates onto the list. Nine of our candidates are under 40 years old and seven of them under 30 and, what is more, all of them are qualified. Our youngest parliamentary candidate, who is only 18, also has several years’ experience of EU issues. We have no special quota arrangement for young people but have made a conscious effort at renewal so that it is possible to give women and young people a real chance to compete with us old men.
It is a pleasure to be able to contribute a success story from the real world to the debate on equality. In the EU Convention, Mrs Dybkjær and others fought bravely for gender equality but, unfortunately, this was only incorporated into the values of the Danish edition. The other countries’ editions just talk about equality rather than gender equality."@en1
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