Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I too would like, first of all, to congratulate Mrs Smet, on my own behalf and on behalf of the Group of the , on her excellent work and on her supreme willingness to take into account the wealth of suggestions made during the debate in committee. The balanced participation of women in decision-making bodies is an issue which is frequently raised and with regard to which Europe has often emphasised the need to take measures, and this issue has by no means been resolved. As the Commissioner said, there is a democratic deficit here in all areas of society – economic, social and political. This report seeks to take stock of the situation in the social and political fields, of the representation of women among the social partners. With regard to this matter, the first thing that becomes clear is the lack of systematic data. There is very little information available about the participation of women inside the organisational structures and internal decision-making bodies of the social partners, while even less information is available about the gender-specific composition of delegations of negotiators in the social dialogue. Moreover, there are no statistics available about the advisory bodies in which social partners are represented. The European Trade Union Confederation has made genuine efforts to compile statistics, but it encountered many difficulties because of the poor cooperation of the national trade unions. In any case, these studies reveal a pyramid structure, in which about 40% of the total number of trade union members are women, and the percentage falls to less than half that figure the nearer one gets to the decision-making structures at the top of the pyramid. There is even less information available regarding employers’ organisations. All this means that women are very poorly represented in negotiating delegations, which has an impact on the success of the equal opportunities policy too. Indeed, in recent years, at the request, not least, of Europe, a number of strategies have been implemented, tailored to the situations of the different Member States, which have led to an improvement in the situation, although it still remains wholly unsatisfactory. In Italy, for example, a policy of positive measures has been implemented within the trade associations, facilitated by legislation and by the funding of specific training projects, to encourage the participation of women in administrative bodies, and, in many cases, this has resulted in organisations including quotas in their statutes. It is true that all this has yielded significant positive results but they have been almost exclusively at local level: progress stops when we reach national decision-making levels. There is a direct link between the participation of women in decision-making bodies and negotiating bodies and the pursuit of an equal opportunities policy. This connection is confirmed, not least, by the results of research promoted by the Dublin Foundation on the subject of ‘Equal Opportunities and Collective Bargaining’ in the Union, which stresses that the participation of women negotiators has yielded positive results in terms of reducing the existing inequalities, increasing the attention paid to reconciling work and family life and tackling the issue of wage inequality between men and women. It is therefore necessary, as Mrs Smet’s report calls, for the European Commission to make a start on the compilation of data and the establishment of a database relating to the representation of women among the social partners so that indicators can be established with a view to increasing the influence exercised by women in decision-making bodies, to create a database relating to the results of collective bargaining in the context of equal opportunities and to use it for the dissemination of best practice, and to urge the social partners to create networks among women negotiators and women administrators with a view to their exchanging experience and expertise and, in their employment policy, to develop further the role allotted to them in the promotion of equal opportunities. The development of the social dialogue at European level will certainly yield benefits in terms of influence, effectiveness and success in the pursuit of the objectives if more gender balance is developed at all levels, including in the socio-economic context.

Political group: PSE