Commission failing to plug staff gender-gap

By Tim King

Date: 16/06/05

The appointment of women to senior and middle management posts within the European Commission is falling far short of the executive's own targets, a trend which the commissioners describe as "worrying".

At the end of 2004, women held only 12.2% of senior management posts. For the first time in nine years, the rate of representation of women in senior management fell.

In middle management, women held only 17.7% of posts. In other administrator grades, they held 35% of posts.

The Commission has been setting targets for the appointment and recruitment of women since 1995, but a paper from Administration Commissioner Siim Kallas issued yesterday (15 June) admits that in 2004 the Commission's performance was "unsatisfactory" and fell short of those targets.

"Following an appreciable improvement between 1995 and 2000, when the percentage of women in senior management rose from 4% to 10.7%, there has been a distinct slowdown in recent years," the paper says.

"A culture change is still necessary to effect a change in daily work practices, in particular late hours of meeting and work," it adds.

The proportion of women in the ranks of Commission staff is being improved by recruitment from the new member states. Of 450 temporary staff from the new states recruited by the end of 2004, 68% were women. But it is not certain that they will progress to the ranks of the permanent staff. Kallas adds a further cautionary note: more than half of them were recruited by the Commission's translation department which traditionally has a comparatively high percentage of women. So the overall effect of raising the proportion of women elsewhere in the Commission will be muted.

The Commission says that women are particularly under-represented in certain sectors - research, information technology and foreign relations - and that specific remedial action is required.

Article reports that a paper from issued by the European Commissioner for Administrative Affairs, Siim Kallas, on 15 June 2005, admits that in 2004 the European Commission's performance as to the appointment of women to senior and middle management posts within the executive was 'unsatisfactory' and fell short of its own targets.