Věra Jourová, Member of the Commission. – Madam President, thank you very much for a very interesting discussion which went beyond the scope of the report. I will use the opportunity to also go beyond it and to present the main principles which the Commission and myself keep working on gender equality topic.

The most important principle in my view is equality in opportunities – nobody says that men and women are the same. We speak about equality of opportunities, breaking the stereotypes which stop women from getting to managerial positions, and we all know that this is still an issue. So equality in opportunities.

Then we come to zero tolerance for discrimination and violence against women. We have alarming statistical figures which show that both open discrimination and violence are problems which need to be solved.

And the third principle, we have to unleash the potential of women in both the political and economic sphere, because this will be to the benefit of the whole of society. Again we have a lot of evidence which shows that it is a short-sighted position of society not to enable women to have managerial positions, to use their qualifications, because 62% of university leavers are women, young women who want to take over part of the responsibility of the development of our societies.

And you mentioned many times that one of the issues which women face is insufficient conditions for working mothers to combine their work and family duties.

That is why, keeping these principles, I want to continue until the end of my mandate and I very much count on the support of this Parliament to finish some of the things which we have started.

Speaking about legislation, first of all, there is the work-life balance initiative, the combination of legislative and non-legislative measures which should create these better conditions for the working women and for working parents if you want to have this gender neutral, because we also here speak about the better possibility for men to share more duties at home and to give a wider spectrum of choices for families to use these better conditions, if they wish.

We have to do everything we can to fight again discrimination, as I said, also by supporting civil society institutions. The equality bodies which we are proposing to strengthen their possibilities to represent the victims of discrimination in the courts for instance, to be concrete.

We are doing a lot of things through the funding of various projects which should decrease violence against women. I am in permanent contact with the law enforcement authorities in all the Member States, where we have common clear understanding that violence against women, especially domestic violence, is a crime which has to be punished.

I think we are doing everything possible to achieve the accession of EU to the Istanbul Convention. We are doing our best in promoting women to managerial positions through diversity charters, and are still also negotiating the possibility of the adoption of the women on boards directive.

So there is still a lot of work ahead of us. We are still not at the end of the mandate and it will be very important that in the next mandate, here in this House, will be a lot of women and men who will understand that gender equality is not a choice. It is an obligation and that we have to solve this problem not as a problem of women but as a problem of our society.

So let’s hope the elections will bring a lot of enlightened people to this House, but also to the Commission, who understand the core principles and the things which need to be done, either the continuation of what we are doing now or new ideas and new visions, and hopefully workable measures to be accomplished or to be used to solve the problem.