WUNRN
Spanish Parliament Approves
Women’s Equality Law
By Associated Press
Thursday, March
15, 2007
MADRID,
Spain - Parliament passed a gender-equality bill Thursday aimed at getting more
Spanish women into elected office and corporate boardrooms - and more men
heating baby bottles and changing diapers.
”Today
is the first day of a different society,” Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero, a self-proclaimed feminist, said during a debate before the
vote.
The final tally in
the 350-seat Congress of Deputies was 192-0, with 119 abstentions. The latter
were from the conservative Popular Party, which has derided the bill as too
interventionist. A total of 39 lawmakers did not attend the session.
The highlight of the
so-called Law of Equality grants 15 days of paternity leave to new fathers,
changing a little-used, current arrangement in which mothers of newborns can
lend all or part of their 10 weeks’ leave to the father. In 2013, the 15 days’
leave will expand to a month.
The bill had already
been passed in the Senate, so Thursday’s vote was final.
Another provision of
the bill says women must make up at least 40 percent of the lists of candidates
that parties field in elections. It will be applied for the first time in May
when Spain holds regional and municipal balloting.
In the business
world, where Spanish women are grossly underrepresented, companies that achieve
more of a male-female balance among their executives and at lower levels will
receive favorable treatment when they bid for government contracts.
Zapatero, who has
made women’s rights and gender equality a hallmark of a liberal-minded
government that took power in 2004, said the law ”will transform Spanish society
forever and for the better.”
Zapatero’s 16-member
Cabinet includes eight women, a first in Spain.
Other measures in
the new program aim to encourage the hiring of women in both the private sector
and for government jobs. The unemployment rate among Spanish women is 14.4
percent, compared with 7.5 percent among men.
The government has
complained that, although Spanish universities educate more women than men,
women are rarely represented at senior levels in the business world.
It says that among
the 35 companies that make up the Spanish stock market’s main index, only 2
percent of board members are women. Elsewhere in the European Union, the average
is 8.5 percent, according to the Paris-based European Professional Women’s
Network.
In contrast, women
were on nearly 15 percent of corporate boards at Fortune 500 companies in the
United States in 2005, the New York-based nonprofit research group Catalyst
reported.
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