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Although 80 pct of the students of the University of Economic Studies (ASE) Bucharest are women, these brilliant women disappear from the financial market 5 or 10 years after graduation, the director for Romania of the European Investment Bank (EIB), Lara Tassan Zanin, said on Monday in a debate about promoting women in the economy.
When I decided to find out more on this subject [of Romanian women's participation in the economy, editor's note], with relevant people from the country, I found that if you go to the University of Economic Studies in Bucharest, 80 pct of the students are women, but, strangely, if you check their career path 5 years and then 10 years after their graduation, these brilliant economics students disappear from the Romanian labour market. And that is why we believe that it is very important to have a public policy proposal that integrates all the approaches, that does not just look at how many women are active on the labour market, but that we analyse the childcare services, which is why there is such a low value. We have a comprehensive policy that supports the idea of gathering relevant data, there are data in this regard, and it is not easy to figure out where the problem is in Romania, Lara Tassan Zanin said.
The head of the EIB Group Office in Romania mentioned that the Romanian banks did not initially monitor the economic participation of women among the companies in the portfolio.
We provided support to all banks in Europe to favour the economic participation of women and when we came to present this opportunity to the banks in Romania they told us that they do not need these specific products in Romania, that there is no problem here in Romania. And I said I'm really glad to hear that, do you have any figures to support that statement? How many women managers do you have in your portfolio? In fact, in reality, no bank has had such data, no bank has ever monitored this concrete approach to activities, Lara Tassan Zanin highlighted.
The representative of the European Investment Bank stressed that women's economic participation is at the heart of the bank's strategy and added that the European Investment Bank supports a strategy to quickly implement the growth of women's involvement in the economy.
I am of Italian nationality and at the beginning [in Italy, ed. n.] the initiative was not taken seriously, but along the way, over time, it was, and now it is known that we have more active women, who participate in the relevant sectors, and if at the beginning women were put at the bottom of the list, it took several years of work, but now we have a woman party president in Parliament, our Government currently has 50 pct women ministers, so little by little we are getting there, but it takes time, so we need to have thresholds as quickly as possible and have hard interventions, especially when it comes to statistics, the representative of the European Investment Bank concluded.
