Mr President, Commissioner, the objective of equality of opportunities between women and men was incorporated into the Treaty of Amsterdam, and this established the legal basis for the Community commitment to working on all the Structural Funds programmes in order to attain this objective. It was also incorporated into the Regulation for the Structural Funds for the 2000-2006 period. Equality of opportunities is an objective in all the programmes and actions cofinanced by the Funds. Despite these very clear objectives and their compulsory nature, we have observed that, apart from the European Social Fund, they are not being met, even when they are included in a programme that is due to be implemented. The European Social Fund is the only programme in the field of employment, vocational training and career development that is meeting this objective with specific programmes intended to achieve equal opportunities; but other important areas, such as infrastructures, transport, the environment, local and urban development, rural development, research, etc., do not feature equality amongst their objectives. Although the European Social Fund focuses on promoting employment, major actions still need to be undertaken, such as reducing segregation in the labour market and pay inequalities, and promoting the role of women in the fields of information and communication technologies, entrepreneurship, new employment opportunities and the decision-making process. We ask the Commission to adopt more specific and more effective measures to remedy these shortcomings. We also think that there is a clear lack of will in the Member States to promote the objective of equality in the Structural Funds. It is true that progress has been made on compiling statistics broken down by gender, which gives us a truer picture of the situation, but monitoring indicators for the programmes have not improved in relation to previous programming. The Member States are responsible for programming and we ask them to make more of an effort to support specific policies and actions to achieve the objective of equal opportunities, by selecting projects that meet this aim. The Member States could also develop infrastructures, such as nurseries, and day centres for the elderly or the disabled; normally these obligations are taken on by the women in the family and, with the appropriate infrastructures, we could ensure that women are better integrated into working life, promote the reorganisation of working time and arrangements for returning to work after long absences and do more to raise awareness of the need for an equal division of tasks between women and men in families. Particular attention must be paid to women who find it harder to achieve equality of opportunity, such as women with disabilities, immigrants and heads of families. Greater integration of women into decision-making bodies would undoubtedly facilitate this task. Training and awareness-raising in the field of equal opportunities should not only target these women, however, but society as a whole. Let us take the opportunities provided by the Treaty and the Structural Funds Regulation to make progress in equal opportunities with projects that fulfil these objectives. The mid-term evaluation that will be undertaken this year, half-way through the programme, must analyse the extent to which account has been taken of this objective: the nature and the size of the appropriations earmarked for these practical actions in the field of equal opportunities to undertake the necessary changes, for the second programming period. Account must also be taken of the importance of these actions in the candidate countries, which will become Members of the EU in just over a year and which have administrative and economic restructuring difficulties that particularly affect women.

Political group: PPE-DE