TOP E.U. JOBS STILL FOR THE BOYS !

Top EU jobs still for the boys
By Stephen Mulvey EU reporter, BBC News.

In the European Union it is the Year of Equal Opportunities for All, and the celebration of International Women's Day has already begun.
But behind the smiles and the good intentions, what do the hard facts tell us about the position of women at the top level of EU decision making?
One figure - 30% - tells part of the story.
This is the proportion of women members of the European Parliament (236 out of 784), and the proportion of women commissioners (eight out of 27).
Anne-Marie Goetz of the UN agency Unifem says it's a good performance by international standards, one that positions the EU bang on the target set by the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women.
"It's an achievement worth celebrating, but it should be seen as a starting platform," she says.
Thirty per cent is regarded as a critical mass, at which point women are able to act together to promote legislation to defend gender equality and women's rights.
In fact, the European Parliament has for years been passing resolutions calling for equal representation of men and women, but the matter is out of their hands.
Discrepancies

The proportion of women members of the European Parliament is 30%While a form of proportional representation is used for European elections in every country, the selection process for candidates is determined by each political party.
This leads to some big discrepancies.
Some 46% of Dutch MEPs are women, for example, but the UK languishes some 20 percentage points behind, and the Italy falls below 20%.
Of the British MEPs, 58% of Liberal Democrats are women, 42% of Labour MEPs are women, and there is just one lone Conservative woman MEP out of 27.
UKIP has 12 MEPs all of which are men, while both British Green MEPs are women.
"The situation is very strange - they cannot have a group photograph taken without me, because it looks like something out of the 1930s," jokes Caroline Jackson, the Conservative woman MEP.
The problem, she says, is that candidates were selected by means of a mass ballot of party members, who showed a preference for men.
The party is taking steps to field candidates more representative of the country at large for the next national election and is set to do something similar for the European Parliament election in 2009.
This will almost inevitably involve some incumbent male MEPs losing their seats, as it did when the Labour Party put forward lists - which alternated male and female candidates - for each European constituency at the last election in 2004.
Quotas
UKIP, however, has no plans to change. Spokesman John Whittaker says the party is "non-racist, non-sectarian and non-discriminatory" and will not be discriminating in favour of women.
Portuguese MEP Ana Gomez argues that EU member states have the power to end the under-representation of women in the European Parliament at a stroke, by legislating to introduce a minimum quota of female candidates.
"You cannot have genuine democracy until you have both sexes equally represented," she says.
She also points out that the number of women commissioners does not reflect the overall situation of women employed by the European Commission.
While 49% of people employed by the Commission as administrators or assistants are women, the proportion in the top four administrator grades is a mere 16%.
"You have an army of women in top positions, who are crucial in preparation of decisions, but you don't find them at the top level of decision-making," says Ms Gomez.
One example she cites is the make-up of European Commission diplomatic delegations. There are 107 of these around the world, and most of the officers in them are women. However, in 98 cases the top representative is a man.
The European Union does have some worse problems to deal with, for example a dire lack of diversity in the European Parliament: Only 13 of the 784 MEPs come from ethnic minority backgrounds.
But in this year of Equal Opportunities for All, there is still a long way to go before women have equal opportunities in the EU institutions themselves.

BBC NEWS REPORT.