Mrs. Louise Weir:

I thank Senator Boyhan for his comments. I want to pick up on one of the points he made about representation, which Dr. Farrell dealt with. All of these things do not happen in isolation. They are all interconnected. When we say we want women sitting at this table, making decisions on policy or on funding, it is also about barriers that will prevent the woman from being able to do that, such as childcare to let the woman come and be here. It is not equated with a lack of confidence. Not being able to come and speak here like we are is not a matter of confidence. It is about having the soft infrastructure in other sectors that allows them to do that.

In saying that, while sometimes we come to these meetings, easily identify barriers, what the issues are and what we should have, the message from us and from our project is that we have tools, we know the answers to some of these things, we have gender quotas, we have different governance structures we can put in place and we have a newly elected member in Romania who is a woman. She is the first in her community, because in fact she and another mother took charge of setting up a social enterprise. It is about engaging other sectors like social enterprise to set up the community centre. She then became voted as the first female ever elected in Romania, in her community, to become the voice. She is now the spotlighted person and becomes the champion for other women to show that we can do this. It is, however, a matter of all the other structures needing to be put in place and there are barriers involved in that. The take-home for us is that we have the tools to do it. We need to give teeth to the measures that are put in place. It is in the rural agriculture action plan. They are there and we just need the measures and tools to give it the teeth to make it manifest.