We have set up a proactive and wide-reaching network of women all around Europe (ELWN), and our recent seminar about women entrepreneurs (please see the link http://www.eldr.eu/en/resolutions/2008/11/women-rsquo-s-entrepreneurship) was highly successful and thought provoking for both the male and female participants. If one looks at the female presence in the European Parliament these figures are also compelling reading; 44% of the MEPs representing the ELDR family are women, compared to just 39.5% for the Socialists and 24.6 for People's Party (Statistic from OSCE). In the whole European Parliament that same figure is 31%, which means that if gender equality in the other parties would rise to the same level as within ELDR, there would be more than 100 additional women MEPs. Moreover, behind the campaign 2women+2men=4EU top jobs are the liberal MEPs Anneli Jättenmäki and Karin Riis-Jorgensen.

ELDR believes that a liberal policy on equal opportunities is based on two principles: 1) Every woman is entitled to full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms and 2) Liberals should insist on equal rights and opportunities for both women and men with the active support of society, as the whole of society benefits when women can contribute on equal terms. At its last Congress in Stockholm in October 2008, ELDR adopted a number of policies in the field of gender equality, specifically in relation to equal pay and opportunities for women in the workplace as well as the social rights of women. These include, for example, calling on member states to actively work for the equalisation of wages, in order to obtain economic gender equality, both within as well as outside the Union and further measures to enhance the work - family balance. ELDR believes that a combination of actions at the European and member state levels are required and wants the initiation of a European debate about the importance of women entrepreneurs for economic growth and for society as a whole and the establishment and development of European networks of government officials working in the area of promoting women entrepreneurs and women networking.  

Europe's liberals have called upon member states to actively work to protect women from trafficking, prostitution, exploitation on the labour market, and illegal trade in organs and in this regard urge EU states to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings and call for the creation of an EU-wide telephone hotline for the victims of human trafficking.