Tag Archives: Women in Leadership

May 11, 2012 · 7:36 am

Women would be worse off without the EU

There is a growing consenses that there should be more women in leadership positions. It is vital that the people who are making the decisions in economic, social, political and public life are representative of society itself.

I was pleased thefore to be invited to talk a group of women on Wednesday who were visiting Brussels as part of the “Strategic Leadership Programme for Women”. The programme was created with the aim of increasing the number of women leaders in decision-making roles in the North West of Ireland/Northern Ireland.

I was invited to speak by an inspirational woman called Bronagh Hinds, co-founder of DemocraShe. Funnily enough, I found out that Bronagh’s early career mirrors my own to some extent. She was Chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action and Chief Executive of Gingerbread Northern Ireland.

Initiatives like the Strategic Leadership Programme enable women to develop confidence, knowledge, skills and leadership capacity; networks with their peers and to make contact with women who have already succeeded as leaders.

Women continue to face barriers at every stage of their careers that their male counterparts do not have to deal with in the same way. You just have to look at the low levels of women on FTSE 100 boards, or the lack of women in Westminster (only 22% of UK MPs are women) to see that the glass ceiling has not yet fallen in.

Stereotypes of women’s role in the work place, a lack of flexibility when it comes to working hours, a culture in which men are encouraged to promote themselves from an early age and a lack of female role models are just some examples of why this situation continues.

The EU has helped enormously by putting into place equality legislation, especially relating to the work place. The EU also funds a number of actions to advance equality. The strategic leadership programme for example is funded by INTERREG IVA.

In the EU pipeline at the moment is legislation on increasing the number of women on company boards, and further work to close the gender pay gap. Such actions are especially important at a time when our government seems to be trying to roll back time for women.

The European Parliament fares better than the UK in terms of the number of women elected, whilst there is still a long way to go, 33% of MEPs are women, a number of whom hold high level positions within the institution.

One thing that I think the EU does let itself down on though in is the lack of communication to its citizens about its successes. As one of the participants pointed out, the advances that the EU has helped bring about for women’s rights often go unnoticed. Instead we are fed ridiculous Euromyths by certain media outlets about Brussels bureaucrats banning balloons and the like.

I for one am proud to be part of the EU’s actions to advance women’s rights and to get more women in to leadership roles.

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Filed under Labour Party

Tagged as Bronagh Hinds, Euromyth, Gender Barriers in the Workplace, glass ceiling, Strategic Leadership Programme for Women, Women in Leadership, Women on Boards

February 10, 2012 · 10:33 am

As Cameron looks to Norway he will see they are far more integrated with the EU than he likes to think

No-one was more delighted than me when David Cameron said at the Nordic-Baltic Summit earlier in the week that, “the evidence is that there is a positive link between women in leadership and business performance, so if we fail to unlock the potential of women in this labour market, we’re not only failing individuals, we’re failing our whole economy.”

It was, of course, Norway that first introduced quotas as long ago as 2003 decreeing that 40 per cent of directors of listed companies should be women. Iceland then followed with a target that 40 per cent of directors be women by 2013.

Meanwhile, in relation to our own country, a British government policy paper presented at the Nordic-Baltic summit estimated that as female entrepreneurship reached the same levels as in the United States, there would be 600,000 extra women-owned businesses contributing an extra £42 billion to the economy.

As we all know, the Scandinavian countries have excellent records on women and deserve full credit. Britain should definitely follow their example. As an active member of the group Women in Leadership, I commend David Cameron for his speech at the Nordic-Baltic summit. I, and many other women from across the political and social spectrum will, I know, now be monitoring this government to make sure Cameron’s promises are translated into action.

Norway is a magnificent country which has much going for it, not the least of which is its enviable record on women. Many of those who are anti-EU quote Norway as the example the UK should follow, in that it is outside the EU and therefore, according to the logic of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan and his acolytes, free of “Brussels bureaucracy” with more home-grown democracy.

It has, for some, been all too easy to accept this argument. It is, however, fundamentally flawed.

A report recently commissioned under the chairmanship of Professor Fredrik Sejersted and published by the Norwegian government states, “we [Norway] are almost as deeply integrated as the UK.” Importantly, the report, covered by the BBC online, expresses concern at the political consequences of this state of affairs as Norway is bound, in practice, to adopt EU policies without voting rights. Professor Sejersted calls this “a great democratic deficit …. but this is a kind of national compromise since Norway decided it did not want to join the EU.”

It is worth noting that two-thirds of Norwegian private sector investment goes to Europe and that there have also been high inward flows of EU immigrants into Norway. These are two good reasons why Norway has felt the need to sign up three-quarters of the legislation coming from the European Union, a total of 6,000 legislative acts.

The overarching conclusion to be drawn from Professor Sejersted’s report is that in 2012 no modern democratic country can exist on its own, cut off from its neighbours. Yet this is the underlying demand coming from the 102 Tory Eurosceptic MPs who wrote to David Cameron on 6 February. Since their number included all the officers of the 1922 Committee – Graham Brady, Charles Walker, Mark Prichard and Brian Brinley – and former Cabinet Ministers John Redwood and Peter Lilley, the Norway lobby is obviously a strong one.

My view is that reverting to the status of Norway would be disastrous for the UK. Leaving aside the democratic deficit – that we would be signing up to EU legislation without any say over it – we need to develop a mature British patriotism for the 21^st century. This is not about belly-aching about the reach of Brussels but much more, as Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander wrote in the Guardian at the end of last year, about how we, Britain and Europe, engage with the rise of China and India.

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Tagged as bbc, Brian Binley, Charles Walker, Daniel Hannan, David Cameron, Douglas Alexander, Fredrik Sejersted, Graham Brady, Guardian, John Redwood, Mark Prichard, Norway, Peter Lilley, Women in Leadership

December 10, 2009 · 9:00 am

Women Leading Europe

Women in Leadership in the Information Society (WiL) is an influential and fast-growing organisation which campaigns for, amongst other things, the use of quotas for women to encourage greater numbers of them into the business sector. Quotas have been adopted with great success in Norway, where a law has been introduced that says 40% of corporate directors must be women.

As a female MEP, and as a member of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, I have long been concerned about the low numbers of women who are appointed to high status entrepreneurial posts in most European countries. It is a problem that is frequently raised in the European Parliament, but which remains unresolved, despite notable general improvements in the last decade in the advancement of equality between women and men in the workplace.

With this in mind, I was delighted last week to be asked to join WiL and meet two of its key members, Thaima Samman and Julie Harrison. Samman is a senior director at Microsoft Europe and was the founder of WiL. Harrison is a managing partner at Blueprint, a public affairs, policy advice and strategic communications consultancy. During what proved to be a lively and interesting discussion, Ms. Sammon and Ms. Harrison briefed me on the work of WiL and highlighted why its existence is of such great importance. They, like me, are keen to see greater participation of women in decision-making positions, and believe that it is vital for high-level female representatives to work closely with European institutions and EU members in order to advance opportunities for women in the economic sphere.

There are many reasons to be concerned. According to findings by the WiL, only 20.3% of businesses with venture capital in Europe belong to female entrepreneurs. Last year, just 15.2% of all Fortune 500 company directors were women. Furthermore, in national parliaments across the EU, in 2008, less than a quarter of members of parliament were women. Statistics like these are worrying, particularly when compared to parts of the developing world such as Rwanda, where women MPs actually outnumber their male counterparts. While this is a huge achievement for Rwanda, it renders debateable the idea that Europe is leading the promotion of gender equality in the workplace.

The WiL was launched just under two years ago, and since then it has been expanding at an astonishing rate. The network’s primary goal is to promote gender equality and the advancement of women in Europe, by bringing together women who have themselves overcome gender discrimination in order to secure high-status jobs and careers. There is no arguing that female entrepreneurship matters; it is an important engine for future growth. I am therefore strongly against the idea that we must simply wait around and just hope that change happens. Those with the power to do so should invest in equal opportunities for all and actively encourage businesses to improve the way they operate.

WiL has already embarked on several ambitious projects, including the setting up and running of a mentoring programme for young women starting out in business and in their careers. Their policy recommendations include facilitating access to a scientific and research learning environment by introducing more scholarships for women in these areas.

I am extremely proud to be part of a network that is playing such a vital role in the promotion and advancement of gender equality, and I very much hope that it will continue to grow and expand at the same rate it has done since it was first launched by Thaima Samman in 2007.