EU Walks the Talk on Gender for Top Leaders - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The leaders of the 27 European Union countries picked a man as Union president and a woman as EU foreign policy honcho in a process that showed balance not just in gender but also on several other levels.

• While most of the global news media criticised the selection of the “unknowns” — Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium as President and Baroness Catherine Ashton of Britain as foreign affairs chief — 20-first salutes the courage of Europe’s gender balancing convictions and notes that the new leaders seem to be quiet, competent professionals who believe in consensus.

• Those qualities may be 21st century leadership traits particularly relevant to leadership in the complexity of Europe.

• “Their appointments emerged in a deal designed to balance internal E.U. interests, giving the top post to the center-right Mr. Van Rompuy from a small nation and the other to Ms. Ashton, a center-left politician from a big nation.” the International Herald Tribune wrote, even as it left unmentioned the gender balancing.

• On the other hand, the individual countries’ nominations for the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, are a very different matter. In the initial presentations of the first 20 nominations, only 3 women were named.

• An outpouring of protest — including a letter to the Financial Times by two (women) commissioners and the Vice President of the European Parliament (also a woman) — brought improvement, with at least one country altering its nomination and eventually seven of the 24 nominations public as of Nov. 21, 2009, being women.

• But with only three countries left to make public their nominations, the only way to get at least a third of the positions filled by women may be for the European Parliament to reject the slate.

Sources:genderbalancedcommission.eu, European Voice, Financial Times, IHT.com