A new EU “gender equality” policy, advanced by the European Commission, is focused on further increasing the number of women in the workplace, to the exclusion of women who choose to work in the home.

The new five-year strategy, adopted on Tuesday, sets out a range of objectives, which include getting more women into the labour market with a long term aim to reach an employment rate of 75% overall for women and men and getting more women into company boardrooms.

However, the new strategy ignores the well documented wish of many women to work in the home, while many others are happy to mix caring for their families with paid work in the labour market.

Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship said that she might consider enforcing gender quotas on firms in the EU to ensure that more women entered the boardroom.

She said: “I have not been an advocate of quotas for women in senior business posts in the past, but given the lack of progress in this area, we might in the future have to consider taking initiatives at the European level.

“I plan to meet with the chief executives of major publicly listed European companies in spring 2011 to discuss the situation and the scope for determined self-regulation. Depending on the outcome of this dialogue with industry, I will consider whether further initiatives will be necessary in 2012.”

The strategy will also be promoting female entrepreneurship and self employment and instituting an annual European Equal Pay Day.

According to a number of studies, a majority of women want to either work part-time or be full time homemakers, while only a minority want to concentrate on their careers full-time.

A Europe-wide study conducted by Dr Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics in 2009 showed that only a minority of women (ranging from 10 per cent in some countries to 30 per cent in others) wanted to participate in the labour market full-time.

Meanwhile, a further minority (again, depending on the country, ranging from 10 to 30 per cent) want to work fulltime in the home. According to Hakim’s study, the biggest group wanted to mix homemaking and childrearing with working in the labour market.

This group varied between 40 per cent to 80 per cent of women, depending on the country.

Similarly, a 2010 study carried out by World Movement of Mothers Europe, which specifically surveyed mothers, found that in Europe as a whole, 11 per cent of mothers wanted to work outside the home full time, 64 per cent wanted to combine homemaking and paid work and 25 per cent wanted to work in the home full time.

The study, which was conducted using the internet, also asked women who worked part-time which option (full time work, a mix of work and family duties or full time house work) they would choose depending on their children’s age.

It found that virtually no women wanted to work full-time when they had a child of under four years of age, while only 10 per cent of women wanted to work full time if they had a child aged between 7-11. Only about 17 per cent of women wanted to do part-time paid work when their child was less than one year old. Eighty per cent of women wanted to work full time in the home when their child was under the age of one.

Unsurprisingly, the study also showed that women were far more willing to work full-time after a child had passed the age of 18. According to the study, 50 per cent of women would work full-time after their child had reached 18, and this number rises steadily as the age of the child passes 19.

A UK poll carried out in 2009 also showed that the vast majority of women believed that a married woman with two primary school children was better off either working part time, or full time in the home, rather than working full time.

The poll, carried out by the Centre for Policy Studies, showed that 56 per cent of women believed that mothers in a such a situation were better off working part time, while 34 per cent of women believed mothers in such a situation were better off working full time in the home.

Only three per cent believed that mothers with two primary school children should work full time.

Amongst mothers, the poll found that 55 per cent of mothers believed women were better off working part time, with 39 per cent believing they were better off doing full time house work. Only two per cent of mothers believed women in this situation were better off working full time.

This is backed up by Census data here showing that, while many married women are in paid work, a large percentage of these are in part-time work.

CSO figures show that married women with children are much less likely to work full-time than men. For example, a third of married women in their 40s don’t work at all. Most of these will have children under 12. Another 127,000 women work fewer than 20 hours per week compared with only 32,000 men.