EU Sees Women as a Remedy to the Recession - Building Gender Balanced Business

• EU Equal Opportunity Commissioner Vladimir Spidla knows one sure route out of the economic torpor of these times: Getting more women involved in the economy.

• “Discrimination produces inefficiency,” Spidla said at the start of a European campaign against the gender pay gap. “It is precisely during times of crises that we should be most active.”

• Spidla cited several studies, including one in Finland and another in France,”:redaxo//763 that show that including more women in management leads to better results at companies.

• Only 58% of women of working age in the EU were employed, as of the most recent EU data, while 72% of men had a job. And 31% of women but only 7% of men worked part-time.

• What’s more, just 30% of Europe’s managers are women — a mere 10% at large corporations.

• Spidla noted that some of the countries with the worst-performing EU economies, like Italy, also have especially numbers of working women.

• He stressed that if a country “does not use its full human potential, it will have more problems”.

The Deutsche Welle article