THE EU IS TO LAUNCH a five year plan aimed at reducing discrimination against women in the labour market and society. The ‘Roadmap for Equality Between Men and Women 2006-10’ sets out six priorities for the EU Commission in the next few years: achieving equal economic independence for women and men; enhancing reconciliation of work, private and family life; promoting equal participation of men and women in decision-making; eradicating gender-based violence and trafficking; eliminating gender stereotypes in society and promoting gender equality outside the EU.

A new ‘European Institute for Gender Equality’ will gather statistics, and analyse while providing expertise and raising awareness among the EU population. The institute should receive funding of €52.5 million while the €650 million PROGRESS programme will help to support the rest of the road map. It seems that these initiatives come not a moment too soon as a report on gender equality for the EU recently showed an enduring pay gap between men and women as well as a paucity of female bosses and decision makers (see statistics on page 9). Pay rates were, on average 15% less for women with unemployment being		15% higher, female workers were often concentrated in low wage occupations with a high proportion in the health, education and public administration sectors. Part time workers in the EU countries were overwhelmingly female (32% of jobs done by women were part time, 7% of men’s). Only 32% of managers 10% of company board members and 3% of chief executive officers were women. Among the reasons advanced to explain this state of affairs the difficulty of balancing work and family stood out. Not only does this disadvantage women’s careers but it lowers the already sagging EU birth rate as they opt to have fewer children.
	Some examples of the gender pay gap

 As far as individual countries are concerned the UK comes out badly with a 22% pay gap. The ‘Women and Work commission’ found that female workers were concentrated in Caring, Cashiering, Catering, Cleaning, and Clerical and that ending such ‘job segregation’ would benefit the economy to the tune of £23 billion. Commission chairwoman Margaret Prosser said it was an outrage that the UK gender pay gap was one of the worst in Europe, ’Many women are working day-in, day-out far below their abilities’ she concluded. Meanwhile in Spain the socialist government has proposed a law to oblige companies with more than 250 workers to introduce ‘equality plans’ aimed at eliminating discrimination against women in pay, promotion and benefits.

Scope for recruitment by Irish unions says report
A NEW STUDY BY AN IRISH university suggests that there are opportunities for trade unions to greatly increase their membership in the country. Union membership in Ireland has declined in recent years, in a similar way to that in the UK, and is now down to about 35% of the work force from a peak of 62% in the early eighties. However Professor John Geary of University College Dublin found that 'only 24% of non-union members employed in unionized companies had ever been asked to join a union’ while 40% of them indicated that they were willing to join. In non-unionised workplaces where management was not thought to be hostile to union representation nearly two-thirds of those asked by the survey said that they would join. Overall, if all prospective members were recruited, union density in Ireland would rise to around 71%, says the report.
In the minus column, though, the shift in jobs from traditional sectors of the economy to services continues to harm recruitment while US-dominated foreign investment is often made by firms that are non-union. Employees often have high expectations of the influence that they should have at work but the report believes that even those employers who are willing to negotiate over wages and conditions will resist any wider rôle for unions.