Brussels, 08/03/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Monday afternoon 7 March, the Council adopted a new European pact for gender equality for the period 2011 - 2020. It urged the European Council to approve this pact in the conclusions of its meeting this spring. The objective is to meet current challenges in the area of gender equality policies and ensure that the question of equality between men and women is taken into account in all the different fields, particularly within the scope of the EU 2020 strategy. Miklos Réthelyi, the Hungarian minister for national resources, explained that the Hungarian Presidency will to this end significantly step up the number of most senior level meetings, with the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, to ensure that this pact is appropriately included in the European agenda
The day before International Women's Day, European ministers confirmed their commitment to gender equality. The revised pact (the first was devised in 2006) is expected to take into account the EU 2020 strategy, as well as the Commission's new strategy on equality between men and women (2010-2015). Member states are aware that gender equality contains an essential economic dimension. They are also convinced that as part of the 2020 strategy, men and women should experience improved employment rates. Everyone at the Council agreed on the need to combat violence affecting women and girls. Miklos Réthelyi, presiding over the meeting, said that this issue should be one of their core concerns. He also highlighted the fact that equality in itself is a value and a human right.
European ministers were also able to hear a speech by Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding, who is responsible for equality issues. In her speech, she referred to different developments in this domain. EU-inspired progress “is not going as quickly as we would have hoped: equality before the law is one thing but in reality it is sometimes a completely different story”, pointed out Réthelyi, for whom women's skills in our daily lives should be an element for improving our productivity and economic performance. In reply to a journalist, who was asking about equal opportunities in the employment field, within the context of the EU 2020 strategy, the Hungarian minister explained that the EU had clear indicators with regard to general employment, not only for women. He also said that they needed to make much more effort to ensure that the time spent by women at home and caring for elderly people is considered as working time and valued as such on the labour market. There is the problem that in certain countries, women's skill sets are higher than men's but when the question of managerial posts is involved, this trend is completely reversed, concluded the president of the Council. (G.B./transl.fl)