Commission gets its first female secretary-general

By David Cronin and Tim King

Date: 10/11/05

The European Commission has appointed its first-ever female secretary-general as part of a wide-ranging shake-up of senior officials.

Irishwoman Catherine Day, who has for the last four years been director-general for environment, will become the most senior official in the Commission on 21 November when she is to take over from her compatriot David O'Sullivan.

O'Sullivan will move to become director-general for trade, replacing Denmark's Peter Carl, who will take Day's old post at environment.

François Lamoureux, the Frenchman who has headed the transport and energy directorate-general, will no longer be a director-general but will become an adviser to the Commission President José Manuel Barroso.

But Lamoureux's compatriot, Odile Quintin, currently director-general of employment and social affairs, will still control a department. She will swap jobs with Klaus van der Pas, director-general of education and culture.

Commission officials were at pains to argue yesterday (9 November) that France had not lost out in the reshuffle. Frenchman Jean-Luc Demarty, a deputy director-general of agriculture, becomes director- general in the same department, replacing José Manuel Silva Rodr’guez who takes over as head of the research DG. Françoise Le Bail, Barroso's spokeswoman has been given the post of deputy director- general in DG Enterprise.

"In shaping the structures, we found ourselves in a situation in which there was no slot that would match the high-level profile of Mr Lamoreux," said a source close to Barroso. "There was nothing to offer to correspond to what Mr Lamoureux stands for."

The job that Lamoureux had long wanted, that of secretary-general, went instead to Day. Born in 1954, she joined the Commission's industry department in 1979 and then worked in the cabinets of commissioners Richard Burke, Peter Sutherland and Leon Brittan. She held director and deputy director-general posts in the enlargement and external relations departments before becoming director-general of environment in 2002.

David O'Sullivan will be immediately immersed in preparations for the Hong Kong ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization, which some people had thought would delay Peter Carl's move from DG Trade. Carl's shift to environment was greeted with suspicion by environmentalists.

Alexandra Wandel, a trade policy campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "Peter Carl is not known to be open to dialogue with non governmental organisations. In the past, he has been very closely linked to corporate lobby interests in Brussels."

But Adrian van den Hoeven from the Euro- pean employers' federation UNICE said: "Peter Carl has been an excellent administrator and negotiator from an industry perspective."

Gender equality in European Commission

• Commission President José Manuel Barroso said: "The appointment of Catherine Day as secretary-general, even if based on her own merits, is emblematic of our commitment to gender balance."
• Figures prepared by the Commission show that the administration has failed to meet its targets for the recruitment and promotion of women
• In 2004 the Commission set an objective of appointing seven women at the level of director-
• general, deputy director-general or director. Only five appointments were made before this week
• Women took only 23% of promotions in middle management, against a target of 27%. A target of equal recruitment to administrator posts was also missed. Women made up 44% of recruits
• The annual programme for gender equality in the Commission will be discussed by commissioners later this month (22 November)

Article reports on a reshuffle of senior posts at the European Commission, November 2005.