Gender balance & "Females in Front"

There is quite a lot going on around the campaign for a "Gender Balanced Commission" that started just yesterday - including a mentioning of the campaign on European Voice.

We finally get to a point where this issue is not just something for the "feminists", we are arriving at the point where even national news start to recogise the topic (right now it's on the top of the front webpage of the Austrian newspaper "Die Presse" and the campaign is mentioned by El Pais).

I am really glad seeing this, in particular since the issue of gender balance has been one of the guiding lines of this blog. I just looked back and found that my fourth post ever, 1 1/2 years ago, was on "Females in Front", an initiative that demanded that at least one of the three top EU posts would be for a woman and that has almost 200,000 signatories by now.

In two or three days we will know whether this initiative had any success, whether following up was worth the time, or whether the political and social struggle will have to continue - maybe through a rejection of the proposed Commission college in the near future.

On thing is clear for me:

We - men and women - need to stick to this matter, we need to keep it on the agenda until the moment when European leaders will recognise that gender balance as a policy issue has left the back rooms and has become a priority issue for more than just the hard core, an issue strong enough for a campaign like this and strong enough for the European Parliament to act decisively...