(subtitles in DE, EN, ES, IT, NL)
Jolante Reingarde – gender equality in Europa
Looking around Europe
I am very encouraged…
by the advancement in the equality
between women and men…
in many areas of social life,
especially public life.
But there is one area
where women are still in minority…
and where the decisions
are overwhelmingly taken by men.
There are 28 national central banks
in the European Union…
and only one of them, in Cyprus,
is headed by a woman.
Of all finance ministers in the EU
only two are women in Romania and Sweden.
And that’s extraordinary!
That’s 2015.
It seems that all decisions
about our money are taken by men.
We have no women
on the board of governors…
of the International Monetairy Fund
representing the EU.
And the EU is assumed
to be a leading continent…
in the area
of gender equality and human rights.
That is very shocking.
How can I explain this to young people?
How can I explain this to my daughter?
Men control the money in EU.
We also looked at the corporate culture
and the cultural perception of leadership.
How do we understand
what the good leader is about?
And what we see,
is that basically leadership…
is very much associated with such qualities as
agressiveness, competitiveness,
working long hours,
informal networking after the work,
which are basically like masculin features.
And these are very, very difficult to overcome.
One-sided corporate cultures.
Vandana Shiva – The importance of women.
Women were left to do the work
that was considered not important.
Going to war and killing
was considered important.
Making profits at the cost of others
was considered important.
That’s where men…
Powerful men designed it…
and they sucked in not powerful men
to do their dirty job.
Women were left
to do the real things:
provide the water, provide the food,
take care of the family.
The values we need…
are the values of knowledge
of how to live with nature,
That’s what women’s knowledge is.
We need knowledge of how to care.
That’s knowledge!
It’s called “emotional inteligence” now.
We need knowledge of how to share.
That is a capacity we will need
more and more in the future…
in a period of privatization.
and in a period of extraction.
So women, with their caring and sharing,
will be the teachers
of how to be human in the future.
We looked at how member states
are trying to solve this problem.
There are member states
that are introducing legal measures…
like binding quotas or targets
that businesses have to implement…
in order to have more women
in board rooms.
There are other countries
like Germany or Britain…
that have very extensive public debates
about this issue…
and they manage
to achieve quite good results.
So there is no one way
to solve this problem.
The most important thing
is political commitment and…
the acknowledgement that the problem exists
and the willingness to solve it.
More gender equality
at the top is key.
Making equality between women and man
a reality for all Europeans and beyond.
