COMMITTEE ON WOMENS RIGHTS AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES
- The Chairperson-
European
Commission ConferenceEuropean Commission Conference
GENDER EQUALITY: Europe's future
Brussels, 4 March 2003
Speech by Anna Karamanou
“Gender
equality is Europe’s future”...I wish to thank and congratulate Commissioner
Reding and her services for this timely initiative and its swift realisation.
When we first met in Strasbourg in September last year, I confided to you,
(Dear Viviane; Dear Mrs Reding) my concern about the low representation of
women in the Convention and the need to develop mechanisms to compensate for
the subsequent risk of downplaying women's concerns in the future
constitution. I told you at the time
about the meetings organised by the Committee for Women’s Rights and Equal
Opportunities of the European Parliament and of the need that was felt to
harness expertise around gender issues and provide assistance on gender
equality provisions to Conventionals.
Shortly
after our first meeting, you announced your intention to hold this large and
high level gathering of the best experts on gender and Europe’s future. You
announced it to the Women's Rights Committee in early December and were praised
for it.
I have
been looking forward to this important first Jean Monnet conference on
Equality. I have great expectations from our debates today, so have the members
of our committee who are involved with the Convention, either directly (Ann Van
Lancker, Lone Dybkjaer) or as part of the working group of my Committee, which
has been formed on the Convention (under the chairwomanship of Heidi Hautala).
This was a long introduction,
proportional to the appreciation and the need we have in the Committee for
Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities for the confrontation of academic
thinking with the questions that we will address today.
I am happy to have been given the
responsibility to trace the conceptual framework for this debate; in other
words what are the terms of the challenge we are facing. What is today the link between gender equality and the future
of Europe?
I started my speech with the
sentence: Gender equality is
Europe's future.... The questions you may ask are why? And how?
I will try some answers to these
questions right after a description of the global context in which we are
operating.
The global context
The EU constitutionalisation process
is taking place at a time of great transformations, which have a deep (though
often ignored) impact on gender relations and on public policies. Three
evolutions in particular are shaping the reshuffling of power and resources which is taking place world wide:
1. European integration and the
upcoming enlargement of the EU;
2. Globalisation, and
3. Post 11th September
Trauma.
Without going into great details, they
are worth mentioning if one is to understand the context in which the EU has
undertaken its « constitutionalisation process ».
European integration has created in the last forty years a vast movement of redistribution of
economic, political and social resources, not only between different levels of
government (referred to as transfers of sovereignty) but also between groups of
actors in society, including of course
women and men. The enlargement of
the EU to 25 and more members is highly likely to increase the tension between policies favouring
competition and those linked to solidarity as is already strongly reflected
in the debates taking place amongst members of the Convention. Consequences on
gender equality will not be neutral.
Globalisation holds the promise of increased trade and wealth, the dream of the
global village where communication has shrunk distances between people, but the
reality is also made of increased inequalities and the mushrooming of criminal
and terrorists networks. Thus the need to develop global policies to guarantee
fundamental rights. If rights are to be effective they must be engineered with
an awareness that both inequalities, criminality, war affects women and men in
a different way hence what is designed for men does not suit every situation.
11 September has been a
catharsis for an increased stress on values. Has it enhanced the EU soft way of
securing peace by binding nations and people in networks of mutual interest?
Only the future will tell. Meanwhile, the focus of public authorities is on
terrorism and hard responses on singular targets, paying less attention to
other deeply rooted forms of violence and crime, in particular against women
This reshuffling is taking place as women have been empowered:
Ø The first generation of women who have mastered procreation (rather than
being ruled by it ) have reached maturity
Ø A number of them (even if this number is insufficient) are in positions
of power
Ø The majority of the university students are women, in almost every
European country
Ø Younger women do not remember (or understand) why equality is something
which has to be fought for, but they have the ambition to influence things and
feel ill at ease with the
« gentlemen’s club » culture in places of power.
Ø Women in general most often feel awkward having to be confined to fight
for their own rights when they wish to participate on all issues and
fear to be marginalised as single issue persons.
The European Convention creates a new political
space
Or at least it has the characteristics of a new political
space : it is the first time given to a constituency wider than the heads
of states and governments to express and formalise choices on the founding
principles, the rules and the institutions of the European Union: what do its
people want the Union for and how should it work, with which institutions and
to do what are the open questions the Convention has to find consensual answers
to.
It has the symbolic appearance of a
new political space, but it lacks an essential quality, recognised as necessary
in a number of EU agreed political texts[1]:
it is not a gender balanced assembly, only 17 women out of a total number of
105 members, have been appointed to the Convention by parliaments, governments and
European institutions.
Once again, equality is not given,
it has to be explained, justified and translated into legislation and
reality. I will now try to elaborate at
least on explanations and justifications
gender equality at the heart of Europe's future
Why?
I see at least 3 good reasons:
First reason: Democracy
Women cannot be left out of the
quest for a People's Europe "Europe of democracy"(as opposed to the
" Europe of diplomacy" of the "fathers of Europe") for
which the European Constitutional Convention is now a springboard.
While this seems obvious and no one
would disagree with the idea, the practice is different: How is it that the
Future of Europe (or at least the updating of Europe's political and institutional
framework) is presently being shaped by so many men and so few women members of
the European Convention? This is a
blatant proof that not only we need to repeat that "forgetting women creates a democratic deficit" but we
need also to define rules and mechanisms
to guarantee their full participation.
The Convention was unofficially born
in Nice, in December 2000, officially in Laeken a year later. It was charged
with paving the way for an open and
transparent reform of the EU. Obviously an excellent sign for democracy as
well as for gender equality as women's participation should be served by the
involvement of a wider set of actors and a stronger relation to citizens
concerns (people’s Europe).
If we look further back, we realise
that this concern emerged from 1989: The fall of the Berlin wall had not only
opened the door for the most ambitious enlargement of the EU which we now see
be almost realised, but the end of the communist regimes of eastern Europe
meant also a more critical approach of our own, formally idealised democratic
regimes. New demands on people's
participation rose from increasingly educated populations and the absence of
women in decision-making fora started to be seen as an anomaly.
This brings us to question the
absence of women not only in terms of democratic deficit, but also as to the
"efficiency" or "inefficiency" linked to their absence.
If, as we believe, a European
Constitution is to set the highest common norms and standards for the
functioning of a European democratic system, then Gender equality is an indicator
and a shaper of democracy: quantitative, the more women in
decision making positions, the more balanced and representative are public
decisions; and qualitative: Gender mainstreaming was introduced in the Treaty
of Amsterdam as a tool to improve the equality content of policies. Within the
few years when it has been implemented, it has increasingly proved to act as a
scanning of policies for their impact on and relevance to citizens.
Second reason: The promises
of equality have not been realised in practice and women’s rights are fragile.
The latest Eurostat report on the lives of women and men in the EU reveals that
in Germany, the pay gap is still 17% in the public sector and 20% in the
private sector; in the UK, a recent study revealed a
sudden reversal of a 20 years trend: the hourly pay gap has increased in
2002! ; In Spain but also in France, the Netherlands, Greece or
Luxembourg, there are more women than men amongst the poor, the working poor, the
unemployed; they are scarce in management positions and bear the largest part
of domestic work in all EU member states. In the UK again, the media recently
picked up that girls get better A levels than boys, but enter the labour market
on salaries 15% lower than their male contemporaries do.
Statistics and surveys in every
member state have a gender discrimination story to tell, a story which sounds
familiar to women in other member states, not to mention yet the
« equality » situation in candidate countries, not to mention either
that your situation is worse if you are a woman and belong to a racial
minority, if you are handicapped, homosexual, etc.
Far from narrowing, the gap in
income in aggregated terms is increasing as the shrinking of the public sector
and increased economic competition on globalised markets tend to deepen
existing inequalities.
This is not tenable on both
grounds of legitimacy and of efficiency:
If the EU is to be legitimate, it
has to deliver. So far, since the inclusion of equal pay in the Treaty of Rome,
ambitious legislation and strategies have been developed by the EC/EU to
promote equal opportunities for women. Recently, the adoption of a revised
directive on equal treatment for women and men in professional life enhanced
the EU commitment to the principle and is likely to further increase
expectations. But the « rights » to equality do not translate into
« de facto » equality. The
impression that the EU is giving with one hand what it takes away with the
other is strong amongst Nordic women in particular who have consistently been a
majority to vote no in EU referenda.
The evidence that the strain put on
public expenditure by most governments has created new obstacles for those who
were not in a dominant position and in particular for women to be able to
equalise their chances and to seize opportunities is underestimated but real.
One should not have lived to situation of having to, simultaneously, care for
an old parent, look after young children and struggle to keep a full time job
to establish the relationship between macro policies and micro situations. Some
of us know only too well how the degradation of the social state falls on women’s time and resources in the
first place.
What should be done at EU level?
What is best dealt with at national level... and what should be a common
responsibility of the different levels of government? To answer this question
which is one of the central concerns of the Convention, women who have most
often a different life experience to those of men in decision-making positions
have to be heard.
The results of recent studies
showing the extent of all forms of violence including domestic violence on
women and the success of the small Daphne European program are the most visible
parts of the need to enlarge the legal basis to fight discriminations and
promote gender equality across the board in the new constitution and provide
strong « enforcement measures » if the EU is to deliver what it
promises.
On the ground of efficiency, there
is ample demographic evidence to show that if employment rates are to be
maintained, the largest potential labour market supply source in the next 10 to
20 years is feminine. Thus the problem as it stands today is not so much
attracting women on the labour market than making good use of what they have to
offer and keeping them. The performances of girls and young women in education
are not matched by openings on the labour market. The EOC study quoted above
indicates pay discrimination as soon as you enter the labour market; the latest
OECD report stresses the need to improve the quality of women’s jobs.
Third reason: The EU is
a political construction based on « feminine » values, i.e. making
use of negotiation and co-operation as opposed to gun and bomb power. The concept was imagined, as explained by
Jean Monnet, to counterweight barbaric excess of brutal force. Weaving
solidarity through webs of mutual interests between people, families and
nations; creating consensus through negotiations, and acting as feeders and
nurses when comes the war (i.e. organising assistance and reconstruction), are
functions that have traditionally been the fate of women and as such, seen as
natural, requiring no effort or investment, deserving no value on the market.
The EU has transformed this concept into a success story, creating attractive
conditions of sustainable peace, but when comes the war, it is seen as
powerless and is criticised by its own citizens, by its powerful partners for
not having the attributes of male power.
Without denying the importance of
developing a substantial Common Security and Defence Policy, coherence of the
EU with its own nature would dictate to enhance the status of feminine values,
i.e. to demonstrate practically that a change of culture is at work. To choose
to have an equal proportion of women and men at the steering wheel, thereby
giving a clear signal of the importance given to the « feminine way »
of the EU to create peace is one of the possible practical translation of this.
Firmly and visibly embedding the right to equality between women and men into
the priority values of the European Union and an objective to be achieved
is a necessary complement. It is a task for those 88 men and 17 women who are
drafting a Constitution for the EU.
How can gender equality be put at the heart of Europe's future?
By convincing decision-makers that
claims for gender equality are not limited to corporatist demands, they are
likely to benefit society as a whole.
By updating Women’s claims on the
future of Europe:
Ø First, great strides have been made from Treaty to Treaty to steadily
improve the legal framework to promote gender equality. From the "equal
pay for equal work" provision of the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of
Amsterdam, including the latest revised directive on equal treatment in
professional activity, tools, practices and laws which have progressively
marked an improvement in the understanding of gender discriminations and in
ways to fight them. This « acquis » should be integrally embedded in
the new constitution.
Ø Secondly, it already appears that the scope of this legal framework is
too narrow to address questions which are attracting wide attention on the
world and European scenes : i.e. violence against women
Ø Thirdly, gender mainstreaming is only proved to be an efficient tool to
actively promote equality in a context where there is a sufficient number of
women in decision making and within the double approach where positive actions
can be enforced as well. Only this complete framework if engrained in the new
constitution and made highly visible is likely to guarantee progress and avoid
intentional or unintentional backlashes. Within the present very complex web of
conflicting interests and issues which is being knitted into a single text by
the Convention, a vigilant attention to the impact of each recommendation on
gender equality is essential, not least by those whose profession is to think
and alert decision makers on chances and opportunities for the future.
Let me now conclude by saying that I
am increasingly convinced that politicians cannot anymore address properly the
complex issues of toadies’ Europe without the inspiration and analytical power
of academics. I do sincerely hope that we will be able to continue our
"Jean Monnet exchanges of today beyond this meeting as we need to
permanently update our knowledge of changing situations and sharpen our
argumentation. This is my further request to you dear Vivian, how can we set up
a permanent "academic gender watch of European developments" to guide
our action as politicians.
This is particularly true in the
field of gender equality where we are permanently confronted to the paradox of
dealing with a highly transformative issue: (the changes in the roles of women
and men in the last 50 years can only be compared to the recent intrusion of
new technologies in terms of impact on people’s lives) in a very static mental
context infested by the “common wisdom
syndrome”.
Do you remember how John Stuart
Mill, in his essay on the subjection of
women, described as the “common wisdom syndrome”? You recognise it when a
disproportionate number and quality of arguments is needed to argue rationally
against a diffuse and powerful perception of “it has always been like that, why change". In its modern
version, this perception is “equality
exist, why fight for it", in other words inequality or discrimination
is not a collective problem but it reflects on your personal inadequacy to
cope.
The disempowerment of women has for too
long be seen as convenient: wars were left to men, women had to comply with
their consequences. For a number of reasons I have developed above, this very
attitude is a denial of the European Union.
Europe needs more than ever to fully
benefit from the energy and confidence and full contribution of half its
population, it is substantial to the continuation of the European project and
for its voice to be heard loud and clear in a troubled world.