Tag Archives: commission

So where are all the EU women?

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Five inter-related thoughts on the theme of where are all the women:

1) I’ve been following an interesting debate over on Twitter.  Life’s a bit complicated technologically at the moment so my joining in Tweets haven’t all got there, but the gist of the discussion is this: why, when there is an EU-related panel discussion, is it so hard to find a panel with gender balance?  Or more than just one woman?  Where are all the women? (@europasionaria, @EuropeanAgenda @maitea6 @euonymblog)

2) Meanwhile, the European Women’s Lobby has drawn attention to the issue of where all the women are in the European External Action Service (just 36% at present – the petition calling for more can be found here)?  Just over one third?  Seriously, where are all the women?

3) At the same time (and there is a link here too, I promise), my care arrangements have suddenly got more complicated: it now offers half an hour less time in the evenings with no good reason offered for the change, meaning a much bigger risk of being late…
Then, for reasons best known to themselves, the public transport system in London has decided that I should have to have a minimum extra half hour journey a day…
And Eurostar has changed the timing of the Brussels train meaning it is now impossible to catch our care at the end of a day at meetings in Belgium…
Argh!  Logistics nightmare!  But I know I’m not alone in this.
Thousands of families have complications. Many sort it out quietly, anecdotally often by having another baby or someone downgrading or giving up work.  Does it have to be like this?

4) Are the EU women working part-time and thus unavailable, or not highly enough ranked to take part in the more public roles?
Short answer is no – not all women are mothers, not all women work part-time. But a big group do.
A quick look at the UK: is it possible to be both successful in your career and work part-time? In the UK public sector, broadly yes.
What about the private and voluntary sectors? Well, the right to request flexible working is out there, for parents and carers at present and with a good take up rate.  It’s less clear how many do not request for fear of career implications or pessimism about being turned down.
Also there is a prevailing view that somehow part-time and full-time labour markets are and should be separate.  Well, this makes no sense given the quality of individuals looking to work part-time whose skills and experience should not be confined to lower level roles (particularly now that the retirement age is gone and older workers might want to reduce their hours without actually leaving work altogether). It also makes no sense given the news that the huge majority of jobs created recently have been part-time (let’s just hope it doesn’t also mean that they’ve been low-paid ones).
Recently there’s been quite a lot of resentment in newspaper letters pages towards demanding parents who have made a “lifestyle choice” to have kids and should not expect any special treatment as a result.
Let’s leave aside for now the “who pays your pension” argument, though it should be made.
More immediately, is there actually anything wrong with parents wanting both to play a major role in bringing up their own children and also using the skills and talents that they’ve spent their lives building up for the profit of all?
And there also seems to be fear about employing women as it is just “more difficult” than employing men (a view openly expressed by working mother Katy Hopkins on BBC Question Time).
So can it be done?  Well obviously yes.
Are there any non-superwoman role models?
The Evening Standard ran a brilliant piece (not available online) on a London mother working a very senior design job at a well-known designer store part-time three days a week – but noted that her father had given her the role with some resistance from other decision-takers. Dammit, why does it take a father to demonstrate that it can work?

What about the EU institutions and related organisations?  Given that the institutions staff are not covered directly by EU legislation on part-time working etc., how exemplary are the institutions as flexible employers?
And what about the lobbying industry?
Or the voluntary sector in Brussels?
Do they expect the Belgian childcare system to step in so parents can work full-time? Is there any scope to work part-time?
And, given the likelihood that family are not close by, what happens when meetings run on past the 6pm childcare cut-off point? Or the essential networking sessions are all held in the evenings?

5)  Final thought: the gender pay gap (notional average wage difference figure) and indeed everything affecting where the women are job-wise, are complex and interconnected.
Not least because it all matters for men too.
Measures taken now might not have immediate effect, but it does not mean no action is necessary.  Governments across the EU, and the institutions themselves, are realising this and trying to do something about it.
Gender balanced panels would be one small step, but a visible one.

Having our say in Europe – but will we get anywhere?

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You may not have caught it on the main news bulletins today (though kudos to Radio 4′s World at One for covering it) but today saw the launch of the European Citizens’ Initiative. 
Despite the name, which has slight Orwellian overtones in English, the policy which was introduced under the newly in force Lisbon Treaty is actually designed to increase the direct access that citizens have to the EU level.

So what do you have to do to get your idea considered by the EU?  Well, the Treaty says you need:
- one million citizens;
- a third of EU countries represented amongst the million (so nine at the moment)..

But it’s not as simple as that.  Today’s announcement was related to the clarification of the rules that the European Commission has just launched following several months of public consultation. 
Presumably in order to stop the accusations of token representation of some countries by having one or two signed up (see the formation of the ECR Group in the European Parliament for the type of debate I’m talking about), the Commission proposes that the number of signatures from each country must be proportional to its size – “4500 for the four smallest countries up to 72,000 for the largest, Germany”.  So if I’ve got, say, 60,000 Germans in amongst my million, that may be an awful lot of individualsbut not enough to count as having representation from Germany and being able to tick off Germany as a Member State where interest has been expressed?
I guess what’s trying to be overcome is the idea of having 995,000 French farmers, or British hunt supporters or Greek public servants or Danish students or whatever on board with the remaining 5000 made up from a ragbag of other people who think the idea is interesting.
But is there anything so wrong with that?
Inside a country, if one part of that country felt so strongly about a specific issue, would it really escape discussion at the national level…?  Or are other Member States with more federal structures (that’s federal as it’s really meant, with decision-making at clearly defined and subsidiarity-applied levels, rather than the perjorative sense in which UK Eurosceptics tend to use it) immune to discussion issues at the wrong level of decision-making?  
And in the internet age, it might actually be quite straight forward to get 4500 Cypriots interested in something (via Twitter, Facebook etc.) whereas 72,000 is a big ask for anyone – this seems a small country bias? 

The Commission is proposing quite a sensible mid-way stage – “once at least 300 000 signatures from citizens in a minimum of three countries have been collected, the petition will be registered with the Commission and a decision made on whether the initiative falls within the scope of its powers. From that point, the organisers would have one year to provide the outstanding signatures”.
As Michael Mann pointed out on the radio earlier “if a million people called for Mickey Mouse to be President, we couldn’t do that as it is not within the Commission’s powers“. Quite.

The antifraud measures are likely to be the ones that cause sensitivity to this idea in the UK.  We’re used to having to provide our names and addresses for petitions but without a compulsory identity card we are unlikely to have passports on us and as for handing over our National insurance number for a petition… I feel slightly incredulous!  Expect to see headlines about the huge potential for identify fraud with this proposal, ironically just what the Commission are striving to avoid.  If anyone publishes anything on this at all in the UK, of course.

The “who’s the money?” point is a good one though.  It would not be good if this worthy intitiative became an exercise in big companies buying influence.

Finally, once all of the signatures are in place and the request meets the criteria (another is apparently being in the spirit of the EU so I guess that stops one million “federalists” fed up with UK recalcitrants getting together a proposal to kick us out? :) ), then the European Commission has four months “to investigate and decide to pursue legislation, launch a study or forgo further action. It will need to explain its decision publicly“. 
At this point there’s a new feature of decision-making.  Although the Commission is the only Institution with the right of intiative, the idea is that the “proposed rules must be approved by parliament and council”.  This is not the case if, for example, the Commission has some ideas in a White Paper – those might be presented at a Council but they don’t have to be endorsed (I’m happy to be corrected on this!)

I really want to believe that the Commission are going to get some initiatives under this scheme “potentially as early as 2011″.  After all the requirements are setting the bar quite high.
And I hope that there will be a technological level of support for this initiative – will there be a section of the Europa set up to enable this?
My starting point for this is the “petitions” section of the Number Ten website, the UK Prime Minister’s website named after the official residence.  While most petitions tend to get an answer along the lines of “yes the government recognises that this is an important issue and is doing x about it/  which is related to it/ which is nothing really to do with it but the civil servants really hope you won’t notice”, it is important that each petition is on there from a starting point of no one except the originator being signed up to it, and can grow virally (through promotion on subject related internet forums or social media campaigns, mentions in the press, friends telling each other, bake sales etc. etc.) and that the gvernment is seen to be facilitating this.

So that’s the challenge for the Commission now – it needs to be facilitating this process and making it as easy as possible for citizens to meet the criteria, and to be seen to be doing so.  If it succeeds, then it can genuinely say that it is bringing Europe closer to the people.  If not, then the EU remains that thing over there that imposes things on us in the popular perception.  That’s not a challenge I’d want to see end in failure.