Setback for Kinnock’s bid to promote women

Date: 06/01/2000

By Simon Coss

EUROPEAN Commission Vice-President Neil Kinnock's recently launched crusade to ensure more women land top jobs in the institution has been dealt an embarrassing blow.

It has emerged that the Commission recently cut off funding for an innovative project which would have made it easier for the EU executive to recruit top-quality female staff.

The 'European Women's Talent Bank', set up in 1996 by the Brussels-based European Women's Lobby (EWL), is an online database containing information on hundreds of women who have particular expertise in the wide range of policy areas dealt with by the institution. Potential employers can key in the specific skills they are looking for - for example, expertise in EU intellectual property law - and the talent bank will provide them with a list of suitable female candidates. The service has already been used by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to find women with the skills it needs.

However, it now seems increasingly likely that the talent bank will be shut down because a little over a year ago, the previous Commission headed by former President Jacques Santer decided not to renew vital funding for the project. The institution argued that the scheme should not receive any more cash as it had already been granted one slice of funding under the EU's fourth action programme.

But the EWL says it does not have the resources to keep the service running without Union funding. "We have tried to ensure that the talent bank remains operational, but without a full-time person working on it, this has proved very difficult," said one EWL supporter. "It think stopping the funding was a really stupid thing to do."

The organisation says it will do its best to keep the talent bank going and is currently trying to secure private-sector funding for the scheme. But the service is currently out of action because of technical problems and EWL does not know when it will be up and running again.

The news of the talent bank's woes could not have come at a worse time for Kinnock, who announced shortly before the Christmas break that he intended to double the number of women in senior Commission jobs before the end of 2005.

At present, just two of the institution's most senior A1 posts are filled by women, while the other 53 are occupied by men. The Commission's record is not much better when it comes to the next rank down. Of 192 A2 Eurocrats currently working in the EU executive, only 19 are women.