Europe November 2005

People: Simone Young. [Austria] For only the third time in its 163-year history, the Vienna Philharmonic will be led by a woman when the Australian Simone Young conducts two concerts, on Saturday and Sunday, in Vienna. Young will lead a program of works by Bernstein, Copland, Schumann and Mozart.

First Woman is Appointed as Head of EU Civil Service. [Belgium] European Commission has reshuffled the most senior Brussels bureaucracy in a delicate diplomatic dance that balances international rivalries and resulted in the appointment of the first woman head of the commission's civil service. José Manuel Barroso, commission president, made his announcements Wednesday after nearly 10 months of intense internal negotiations. The final lineup was kept secret until Wednesday morning to prevent last-minute lobbying by European capitals. Barroso appointed Catherine Day, an Irishwoman, who is regarded as an economic liberal, to the post of secretary general. In the post, she will be responsible for helping to run the commission and to deal with relations with national governments.

The Gender Factor to Be Raised. [Belgium] Gender experts will gather here this week for an international conference to examine how changing development policies are affecting efforts to promote gender equality and women's rights. The conference on 'Owning Development: Promoting Gender Equality in New Modalities and Partnerships' to be held in Brussels Nov. 9-11 will be jointly hosted by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem) and the European Commission, the European Union (EU) executive. Gender equality experts from developed and developing countries, government representatives and donor bodies will discuss strategies to ensure that women's rights are central to a "new aid architecture". "Unifem will be trying to ensure that that the EU and OECD countries take the lead in women's rights and that new aid flows reach women at country level through country- driven development strategies," Unifem executive director Noeleen Heyzer told IPS. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a grouping of 30 industrialized countries.

Workshop on Women and Work. [Croatia] A workshop on women and work was held in the framework of the ICEM-IUF Southeast Europe project in Crikvenica, Croatia, from 10-12 October 2005. The workshop focused on bullying, sexual harassment and equal pay. The women agreed to do research on pay issues in their jobs and to find out what women and men earn in eight specific occupations. The meeting was one more in the series to build a women’s network in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia.

Head Offering Pregnancy Tests To Girls Aged 11. [England] school has been attacked for offering pregnancy tests to girls as young as 11 - without telling their parents it was setting up the scheme. The initiative is intended to reduce teenage pregnancies in the surrounding area, which has one of the highest rates in Britain. But the headmaster did not consult parents - a move being seen by critics as further evidence of families being denied a say over their children's sexual wellbeing. Rising numbers of clinics at secondary schools already offer condoms and the morning-after pill. They have the power to do so without seeking parental permission.

Hormones Make Women Safer Drivers. [England] The female hormone estrogen could give women the edge when it comes to tasks such as safe driving, say researchers. Tests showed attention span and ability to learn rules were far better among women than men. The Bradford University scientists told a hormone conference in London how tasks requiring mental flexibility favor women over men. A woman's estrogen levels may prime the part of the brain involved in such skills - the frontal lobe - they said. This might explain why girls find it easier than boys to concentrate at school and why women are more careful drivers, the researchers hypothesize. Speaking at the Society for Endocrinology meeting, they said: "This study demonstrates that tasks requiring mental flexibility favor women over men, an area previously not considered to elicit strong sex differences. Driving could be an example of how this is applied to everyday life. "Our study suggests that estrogens may positively influence neuronal activity in the frontal lobes, the area of the brain stimulated by tasks of attention and rule learning, which could explain the female advantage when performing these tasks."

Rape: 1 in 3 Blames Flirty Women. [England] One in three Britons believes a woman who flirts is partly or totally responsible if she is raped, a "shocking" opinion poll showed on Monday. Between a third and a quarter of respondents also put part or all of the blame on the woman if she fails to say "no" clearly to the man, wears sexy clothes, drinks too much, has many sexual partners and walks alone in a deserted area. "It is shocking that so many people will lay the blame for being raped at the feet of women themselves," said Kate Allen, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International UK which commissioned the research.

Respect For Women... and Men. [England] The reality is less funny as even a cursory perusal of last week's newspapers shows. There's the minor stuff, like the story that women are charged hundreds of pounds more than men in garages when they buy cars. And then the more serious stuff, like the fact that in our supposedly female dominated world, only 4% of all seats in executive boardrooms are women's. (You can tell the women's seats. They're less padded. Female directors earn Ł22,144 less than male ones). But we also saw stories last week illustrating the darker side of modern attitudes to women. Like the story saying every three days a woman is killed by her partner in the UK. Like the survey that showed one third of people blame women if they get raped after flirting, or if they are dressed provocatively. A rape expert - a man incidentally - once told me that it was pointless linking women's clothing to rape cases. For one rapist, a long skirt might be a trigger. For another, red hair. The problem was not that the women's signals were faulty, but that the men's receptors were. Yet women are expected to control men's sexual behavior. Perhaps that's why prosecutors fail to secure convictions in 95% of rape cases.

Pretending That Women Aren’t Grown-Ups. [England] Do women want to be treated like grown-ups or don’t they? After 40-odd years of modern feminism the question remains unresolved: are women the equals of men as adults who can take responsibility for their own actions? Or are they vulnerable creatures who need unique protection and special allowances made for them? The Swansea rape case that has unleashed this latest uproar was, in legal terms, pretty straightforward. Once the girl who was the alleged victim said she “could not remember” whether she had given her consent to sex, the case quite rightly collapsed. The degree of reasonable doubt that this admission automatically introduced made the charge unprosecutable. This much, in itself, is not contentious. What produced the controversy was the prosecuting counsel’s more generalized remark that “drunken consent is still consent”. Contrary to much of the excitable reaction to this comment, the prosecutor did not say that committing a sexual act on an unconscious woman should be legally acceptable: nobody has made what would certainly be the morally outrageous claim that being unconscious constitutes de facto consent to sex. The fatal point was that the girl could not recall the circumstances or even her own degree of conscious involvement. The judge, who agreed with the prosecution, instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty.

Why Do So Many Women Think Rape is a Woman's Fault? [England] Amid the furor over whether women "ask" to be raped, two questions stand out. The first is to ponder why - in these days of men's magazines offering one hundred tips to become a perfect lover - some men would wish to have sex with a comatose, unresponsive woman. The second arises from the Amnesty International survey that last week put the rape issue back on the agenda: why are some women so much more damning of the sexual behavior of other women than they are critical of the perpetrators of sexual violence? More than a quarter of those polled for Amnesty as part of its Violence Against Women campaign believed that women were responsible if they wore sexy clothing; 28 per cent thought they were "partially responsible" if they behaved in a flirtatious manner; and one in 12 thought a woman was wholly responsible if she was known to have had many sexual partners. More women (5 per cent) than men (3 per cent) believed that a woman was "totally responsible" for being raped if she was intoxicated. No wonder prosecuting barristers tell apocryphal stories about how time and again it's the middle-aged female jurors who deliver a "not guilty" verdict in rape trials.

England Women Win To Open Series. [England ] First women's one-day international, Faridabad: England 188-7 (50 overs) beat India 168-9 (49.5 overs) by 20 runs. England opened their one-day series in India with their first win in the country for 10 years. Jenny Gunn hit a maiden half-century and off-spinner Laura Harper took 4-33 in the 21-run victory in Faridabad. Put in to bat, captain Charlotte Edwards made 68 and was joined by Gunn, who faced 101 deliveries for her 56, in a third-wicket stand of 90. England had lost their previous seven one-day internationals on the last two tours in India but are now well-placed in the five-match series.

First Woman Wins Jockeys' Title. [England] Nottinghamshire woman has made horse racing history by becoming Britain's first female champion apprentice jockey. Hayley Turner, 22, of Southwell, shares her win with Saleem Golam, also 22, who is the first Asian to win the title. She was apprenticed to Newmarket trainer Michael Bell, but is now a professional jockey having ridden a total of more than 95 winners. Hayley Turner's last win was on Garden Society at Lingfield on 30 October.

Ministers 'Failing To Curb Violence Against Women'. [England] Violence against women is at crisis levels in Britain, a new coalition reported yesterday, but the Government's attempts to prevent such crimes are piecemeal and comprehensively failing. Almost half of all adult women in this country have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking, according to last year's British Crime Survey. Two such victims, accompanied by the relatives of three murdered women, delivered a damning report to Downing Street yesterday, urging the government to take a much more integrated approach to protecting women. The coalition, End Violence Against Women (EVAW), which includes Amnesty International, the TUC and Refuge, believes the Government should appoint a single overseeing body to review and implement strategy on the issue.

Older Women Prove Main Target for Cosmeceuticals. [Europe] With strong market growth continuing to characterize the market for cosmecuetical products, a new report stresses that women aged over 50 will continue to be the core market as graying baby-boomers search out natural anti-aging solutions. Fuelled by the growing availability of high-performance cosmeceutical products, a new report from Datamonitor stresses that this category is likely to show robust growth during the course of the next five years. Defined as product containing more than one bio-active ingredient, the growth taps into an aging population that is no longer willing to accept the inevitable onset of visible aging signs. Having had a significant head-start, Europe is still be far the largest market but the US market is predicted to catch up in the coming years, with a higher growth rate. Datamonitor figures, extracted from 'Insights into Tomorrow's Cosmeceuticals Consumer' show that in the US the market stood at $1.20 billion in 1999 and reached $2.65 billion in 2004. Up to 20009, this market is expected to achieve annual growth of 6.3 per cent, to reach $3.60 billion.

Get the Women Out! [Europe] French golfer Jean van de Velde wants to introduce a motion with the European Tour board calling for a ban on women entering men's events. Van de Velde, who threatened to enter next year's women's British Open after the men's version was thrown open to women golfers, said he wanted a serious discussion on the issue. 'The only question I'm raising is that we have a debate. I'm not trying to be sexist or whatever,' he said. 'My question is, why should women play on the European men's tour?'

Mayor Fined for Barring Show of Islamic Fashion. [France] A French court Monday fined the mayor of the eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois for banning a fashion show that would have displayed a range of women's outfits designed to respect Islamic tradition. The administrative tribunal ordered Jean-Pierre Brard, the Communist mayor of the city, to pay 750, or $900, to the company that tried to organize the event last year, Jasmeen. Brard banned the fashion show on the grounds, he said, that it promoted the wearing of the Islamic veil and that men had been barred from the audience.

A New Reason for Riots: Polygamy. [France] In the search for explanations for the riots that have rocked France, some politicians and intellectuals are pointing to a novel one: polygamy. The remarks have sparked an uproar in France and angry charges of racism. In a statement Wednesday, MRAP, an anti-racist group, accused ''political leaders on the right'' of ''playing an extremely dangerous role in feeding our country with the racism that causes the damage we know.'' There are no official figures for how many polygamous families live in France, although a number of women's rights groups estimate the number as high as 30,000. The families are mostly from Mali, Senegal and Gambia . Polygamy has been officially illegal in France since 1993, but is largely tolerated if the marriages took place before the family emigrated to the country.

Violence Part of Life for Girls in French Suburbs. [France] With nightly scenes of rioting beamed around the globe, the world has learned that France's bleak suburbs are enclaves of gang wars and macho rules. The girls living there have known this for years. Even before the riots, Ophelia, 16, used to run home from school every day because she was afraid of being attacked in the maze of high-rise buildings in her suburb northeast of Paris. A series of gang rapes in these bleak housing estates shocked France a few years ago. In 2002, a 17-year-old girl was set alight by an 18-year-old boy as his friends stood by. Walking near a burned-out garbage bin, Ophelia's twin sister Sandra says the riots came as no surprise. Violence against and pressure on women is part of daily life in the suburbs, where boys can dictate how girls should dress. Apart from poverty, feminists say the dominance of traditional cultures among families of Arab and black African origin, combined with the growing role of Islam in the suburbs, have contributed to the harsh treatment girls get there. Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils. Forced marriages that snatch them from college and career -- where they do much better than their male schoolmates -- are on the rise. The support group "Ni Putes, Ni Soumises" ("Neither Whores nor Submissives") says the number of forced marriages has risen in recent years, with roughly 70,000 girls pressured into unwanted relationships each year in France.

Merkel Takes Oath of Office. [Germany] Angela Merkel is sworn in as Germany's eighth post-World War II leader and its first female chancellor, taking an oath of office that commits her to "dedicate my strength to the welfare of the German people." "You are the first democratically elected female head of government in Germany," parliament's president said earlier. "That is a strong signal for women and certainly for some men, too."

Holocaust Heroine Hannah Szenes Remembered in Hungary. [Hungary] Hungary's Holocaust Museum on Monday organized a tribute to Hannah Szenes, a young woman executed for trying to organize Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Hungarian-born Szenes emigrated to Palestine in 1939 and was part of a group of young Jews sent to Europe in 1944 to try to save Jews. In March 1944, Szenes parachuted into Yugoslavia but was caught soon after crossing the border into southern Hungary. Tried for treason, she was executed by a firing squad in a Budapest prison yard.

Women Strike to Protest Discrimination in Wages. [Iceland] Women across Iceland joined a demonstration on Monday against wage differences between men and women, working a shorter day to protest the differential, officials said. Tens of thousands of women left their jobs after working 64 percent of the day, in an action marking the 30th anniversary of the first such protest in the country.

Vatican Sees Sainthood For Mother Of Eleven. [Italy] Eurosia Fabris, known as "Mamma Rosa," raised two children whose mother died while they were little, then married their father and had nine children with him. The virtues of Fabris, who died in 1932, were honored Sunday in a beatification ceremony in Vicenza, near her native farming village in northern Italy. Beatification is the last formal step before possible sainthood. Pope Benedict XVI praised large families and called for countries to approve legislation and other incentives to help them. The pontiff has said there is no future without children. Fabris was singled out by Vatican Radio as being a "dazzling model of holiness lived out in daily family life."

MPs Ditch Ballgowns in Palace Protest. [Norway] A protest by Norway's female politicians against the media's focus on their fashion sense appeared to backfire on Friday, when tabloid newspapers carried even wider coverage than usual of the women's appearance. Eight newly-elected parliamentarians wore traditional costume rather than ballgowns to a royal banquet on Thursday, to highlight what they say is excessive -- and sexist -- coverage of their clothes rather than their politics. "When we are elected as politicians we are suddenly supposed to dress like professional models and we are judged on what we wear," Labour's Marianne Aasen Agdestein said. "This was a protest at that." Tabloid newspapers often rate women ministers' outfits on a scale of one to six when they attend official functions.

Woman Denies Raping Man. [Norway] A 24-year-old woman who's been convicted of raping a 31-year-old man had a new day in court on Monday, when her appeals trial started in Bergen. The case has sparked international interest. The female defendant once again denied all guilt when her trial opened. She now must testify in front of a 10-member jury. A city court in Bergen found her guilty earlier this year, and sentenced her to nine months in prison. She was also ordered to pay NOK 40,000 (about USD 6,500) in damages to her alleged victim. He's a 31-year-old man who claims the woman performed oral sex on him while he slept. She claims he wasn't asleep, and that the sexual contact was voluntary from both sides.

Women Get Backing For Boardrooms. [Norway] The new leftist government of Norway said on Friday that it would close private companies that failed to give women adequate representation in their boardrooms, a threat already made by the previous government. "I wish to establish, from January 1, 2006, a system of sanctions which makes it possible to break up companies" that do not apply the parity rules, said Karita Bekkemellem, the minister for family and children in the new government, which took office last month. Under the previous center-right government, Parliament passed a law calling for a minimum quota of 40 percent for women on the boards of the roughly 550 public limited companies in Norway, and of state-owned companies.

Sexual Equality Office Among Those To Be Shut. [Poland[ Poland's new conservative prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, announced Friday that the Office for Equality of the Sexes would be one of several agencies to be shut down as part of a cost-cutting drive. Speaking to the press, Marcinkiewicz also announced the winding up of the government's Center of Strategic Studies and public agencies managing agricultural land and military-owned property.

Guide for Girls Sparks Spanish Sex Storm. [Spain] For its proponents, it was supposed to be a woman's pocket guide to relaxation and discovering one's inner self, but for its critics, a Spanish "guide for girls" looks more like the main road to sexual hell and damnation. Rightwing daily La Razon on Wednesday hailed the temporary withdrawal of the guide by the Women's Institute of the central northern region of Castilla La Mancha after a storm blew up over some of its rather fruitier content, which included encouraging girls to try out mutual full body massage. Paloma de Castro, chairwoman of the regional federation of the family, called the guide a "perversion without precedent" which "incites the practice of homosexuality among girls not sufficiently mature to have any kind of sexual relations."

Ochichi Prevents Another Eritrean Win. [Spain] The women's 6km race saw a fierce duel between Kenya's Olympic 5000m silver medalist Isabella Ochichi and the unheralded Eritrean Simret Sultan. From the early stages both Africans took command of the race and remarkably left the other top names - Poland's European XC silver medallist Justyna Bak and the Portuguese pair of Analía Rosa and Ana Días - well behind. It was the 21-year-old Sultan who had the burden of setting the pace with Ochichi, the bronze medalist in the short race at the last World Cross Country Championships, always at her shoulder. The Eritrean held on until the last 50m with the 26-year-old Ochichi claiming a narrow win in 20:40 over her. Sultan was timed in 20:41. So frantic was the pace that the leading duo had set that no less than 45 seconds separated them from third placer Analía Rosa, while Bak, the former World 3000m Steeplechase record holder, had to settle for fourth another five seconds behind.

2M Women Face Domestic Violence. [Spain] Spain arrested more than 28,000 people in domestic violence-related incidents in the first nine months this year, the country's Interior Ministry said in a statement on Saturday. Despite the tens of thousands arrests, Spain witnessed a drop of 11 percent in the number of women killed in domestic violence in 2005, which was 56, compared to last year's 72, according to the statement. The Spanish government has made fighting domestic violence one of its top priorities and the Interior Ministry pledged to assign 1,100 specialized police agents to protect mistreated women by the end of 2005. Amnesty International says 2 million women face domestic violence in Spain, and every four days there is a woman killed by her spouse or ex-spouse. Meanwhile, only 5 percent of victims report such incidents, Amnesty says.

Sweden Poised to Offer Abortion Haven to Foreign Women. [Sweden] Sweden, which already has one of the world's most liberal abortion laws, should loosen restrictions further by allowing non-residents access to the procedure, according to a government-commissioned report. "We suggest that foreign women be allowed to have abortions in Sweden," head of the study Eva Eriksson told reporters in Stockholm. The Scandinavian country has since the mid-1970s offered free abortions up until the 18th week of pregnancy -- no questions asked -- making it one of the world's most liberal countries on the issue. But since access to the procedure has, until now, been reserved for Swedish citizens and residents only, critics maintain the law is still too restrictive, especially since most European Union countries already allow foreign women access to abortion. Eriksson's report, titled "Abortion in Sweden" suggests changing Sweden's abortion law as early as July 1 next year to allow non-resident women the same access to abortion as they have to other health services in the country. The only condition is that they pay for the procedure themselves. "Sweden's EU membership already today implies that women from another EU country should be offered abortion in Sweden despite the wording of the abortion law," Eriksson said, pointing out that neighboring Denmark last year changed its abortion law to comply with European Union rules. Four EU countries today have a total ban on the procedure: Ireland, Malta, Poland and Portugal