Mr President, we are still eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Commissioner, who has indicated that she would be present for this item. I hope that she will be appearing any moment now. In my own-initiative report on behalf of the Committee on Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities, I have dealt with gender mainstreaming in the European Parliament both at political and administrative level. We have held discussions on this in my committee with stakeholders, we have had a series of discussions both with the President and with the Secretary-General, followed by a public hearing, and we have also held discussions with staff representatives and with the advisory committee. The European Union's obligation to promote equality between men and women is rooted in Articles 2, 3 and 13 of the EC Treaty and in Article 23 of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights. Gender mainstreaming as a political strategy is intended to assist in achieving this ambitious objective. This also follows on from the definition of the Beijing Platform for Action, under which gender mainstreaming is intended to further the development, organisation and evaluation of political measures and decision-making processes so that the initial position and the impact on men and women is taken into consideration in all areas of policy and at all levels, with a view to working towards the objective of genuine equality for men and women. Parliament must act as a motor for equal opportunities, as it has indeed repeatedly done in the past, and gender mainstreaming now needs to be incorporated into our political activities and our structures in a coherent and comprehensive way. This report accordingly proposes a whole raft of measures intended to underpin the principle of gender mainstreaming in the long term. Strengthening the position of women is therefore a key aspect, but not the only one, the aim being to adopt a double approach. We propose a number of measures in the report. The European Union needs to lead the way, and Parliament should signal its active commitment by setting up a High-Level Group on Gender Equality, chaired by its President, just as happened at the Commission under President Santer. We are definitely lagging somewhat behind. The Conference of Committee Chairs needs to be involved here and, in conjunction with the Committee of Delegation Chairs, it should make recommendations to the Conference of Presidents as to how to implement gender mainstreaming in the committees' and delegations' work in a concrete way. Our proposal here is that one member, preferably the Chair or a Vice-Chair, should be made responsible for gender mainstreaming and that the individual committees should then identify projects in their respective work programmes to ascertain how gender mainstreaming can be achieved in their area of activity and systematically check the impact of measures affecting women and men. With this in mind, planning and implementation, and also evaluation, need to be oriented towards achieving a defined quality standard and facilitating internal benchmarking. Each committee should then carry out an annual assessment of its activities and achievements in the field of gender mainstreaming on the basis of predetermined targets and should monitor these measures. We propose that the Committee on Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities should then draw the individual reports together into an annual report on gender mainstreaming and make recommendations for further steps. A further package of measures concerning agreement on how to reconcile staff members' professional and family activities is then needed. One important target is the use of gender-neutral language. Our objective, particularly bearing in mind enlargement, must be to involve the candidate countries in this process, and with an eye to the elections to Parliament in 2004 to ensure that equal representation of men and women can be achieved. The situation as it stands is that although Parliament has always been in the vanguard in this respect, the proportion of women Members was 17.5% in 1979, and this has now risen to 31%. However, in the Convention, there has been a step backwards. I believe that it is highly important that we should give a positive political signal by implementing benchmarking and gender mainstreaming, so that the 2004 elections will represent an advance – and not a retrograde step.

Political group: PSE