EU wants threefold rise in women executives by 2015

(VILNIUS) - The European Union wants to see the number of women in company boardrooms tripled within the next five years, the EU's Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said Monday.

Currently "only one out of ten of the members of the boards of publicly quoted companies is a woman," although 60 percent of university graduates are female, Reding said at a seminar organised by the Lithuania-based European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).

"My goal is 30 percent in 2015 and 40 percent in 2020 as women on the boards of the big companies because that will be a strong symbol for other women to show they can do the same," Reding told a press conference.

"The aim is in the spring to bring the CEOs of the big companies together to hear from them what they want to do in order to reach better numbers," she said.

Reding added that significant steps in the process of achieving this goal would also come from the EIGE. Launched in Vilnius this summer, it would collect the data needed "to build sound policy" to fight discrimination, including the gender pay gap, she said.

"We must know why it is that still today the difference of salaries on average between men and women is 18 percent and what we can do in order to solve this problem," Reding said.

EIGE Director Virginija Langbakk said the institute would work at full capacity next year.

Its research on gender equality will form the basis for the creation of an EU Gender Index that will provide the tools to measure progress in gender equality across the 27-member bloc, the institute said in a statement.