Progress has been pitifully slow in realising the objectives laid down for the Government's Draft National Plan for Women 2001-2005. Launched last year, along with some valuable research on the real extent of gender equality in many spheres of Irish public and private life, the draft plan committed the Government to widespread consultation in the preparation of an agreed programme of change, including positive legal action.
Many of the objectives and the need for an action plan arose from the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing - but they are grounded in political and legal obligations set out in the last 30 years under domestic and European law.
As an article in this newspaper today makes clear, precious little movement has been made in achieving them. Women make up 20 per cent of the membership of private boards and 29 per cent of public ones, compared to an objective of 40 per cent. The picture is worse for both Houses of the Oireachtas, for county councillors, and for senior positions in academia, the Defence Forces and the Civil Service. In wider spheres of social life, women choose softer subjects in universities, households they head are disproportionately poor, and female wages remain substantially below male earnings. They are still excluded from full membership of many golf clubs.
This inequality is all a dreadful waste of resources. In the words of Mr Willie O'Dea, the Minister of State with responsibility for equality issues, "I find from working with women that they have more ability and are better at making decisions than men." Probing the attitudes that lie behind the unequal access to senior positions in economic, political and civic life, stale old stereotypes recur. Women are believed by many Irish men to be unable to cope with stress, to change their minds frequently and to distort their reason with emotions.
Such views were wrong 2,400 years ago when they were accepted by Aristotle and Plato and they remain wrong now. But it will take determined action and continued argument and research to change them. Mr O'Dea awaits the response from departments to his demand that nominations to State boards should be on a 50-50 basis. He should not hesitate to propose legislation should it not be adhered to. Statutory action has a definite role to play in compelling change.