The November 2005 riots across France made it clear why efforts to diversify Europe's workforce are important, and why these efforts may pose a particular challenge here. Frustrated at being shut out of the nation's economic and educational mainstream, young people-including blacks, whites, and North African immigrants-torched cars, schools, and churches in poor neighborhoods across France. The riots helped begin to force a change in European nations, like France, that have resisted engaging in diversity efforts, seeing them as a "cultural issue" with no place in business, says Rajvinder Kandola, senior partner and head of diversity at Pearn Kandola, an occupational psychology practice based in Oxford and Dublin.

Aging populations and stagnant birthrates in many nations mean an inflow of foreign students and workers is essential to keep academia and business thriving, many diversity consultants say. Diversification may be particularly important in strengthening the continent's scientific workforce, which is undergoing a "brain drain." A European Commission (EC) survey found 75% of Europe-born scientists who received doctorates in the United States between 1991 and 2000 said they had no plans to return.

Women are another largely untapped resource; just 29% of researchers in the European Union are female, while only 18% of engineers in the business and enterprise sector are women, according to 2006 figures. Meanwhile, the EU has set a goal of every member country spending three percent of its gross domestic product on science by 2010 - a goal the EC estimates will require adding 700,000 new researchers to the workforce. "Everyone, at least in politics, is aware that they have to involve women if they want to reach that goal," says Gerlind Wallon, the young investigator program manager at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in Heidelberg, Germany.

To date, Wallon notes, efforts to boost women's participation in the sciences have had mixed results. While Germany has many rules and regulations on equal opportunity for gender (e.g., requiring female participation on scientific boards), it is among the worst nations in terms of women's representation in the higher echelons of the sciences, she says. Just 17% of those on scientific boards in Germany are women, compared to nearly half for Norway and Finland. Norway, for example, now requires that 40% of all boards of public companies be female, and Spain's prime minister has said he supports a similar plan.

Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the president of the German Research Foundation, has argued that quotas like Norway's will be the only way to solve the problem. Winnacker will become secretary general of the European Research Council in January 2007. There are signs of progress in the second set of Women and Science Statistics and Indicators released in 2006 by the EC's Directorate General for Research. The directorate put out the first round of its so-called "She Figures" in 2003.

At many levels the EC found growth in the participation of women in the scientific workforce is outpacing that of men. For example, the number of PhD graduates grew by seven percent for women between 1999 and 2003, compared to two percent for men. Overall research workforce participation climbed four percent for women during that same period, and two percent for men.

But women's participation needs to grow much faster than this for any real change in gender inequality to occur, the report's authors note. "This differential growth rate, if merely sustained and not radically increased, would thus take a very long time to deliver a significantly improved gender balance."

The figures also show that women in the health and life science professions earn 27% less than their male colleagues, compared to a 16% wage gap between the genders in the economy as a whole. Women also have less access to research funding, and remain much less likely to reach the top levels of science in many nations.

The reasons aren't always easy to explain. Wallon notes that the success rate among female postdocs applying for EMBO fellowships is 16% compared to 20% for men - a difference that persisted even after the organization gender-blinded the committees responsible for the selection process.

While gender equality is a familiar issue for most European nations, ethnic diversity is another matter. "It's not an issue, as far as I know," says EMBO's Wallon. Pan-European diversity efforts focus on gender issues, Kandola agrees, while the country-by-country commitment to other types of diversity varies widely. "The UK, the Netherlands, and some of the northern European countries have a grasp of diversity which is actually quite wide ranging," he adds. "In other countries it's very much applying lip service to the whole topic."

In 1998, the EU passed legislation requiring member countries to phase in laws banning employer discrimination on the basis of race, religion and belief, sexual orientation, age, and disability. The phase-in is supposed to be complete by December 2006. Some countries already had similar laws on the books, notes Paul Abell, managing director of the Amsterdam-based A&E Consultancy, which works with businesses and the public sector on diversity issues. But for the newer EU members, "it's something quite new."

Until recently, the European view of the best way to fight inequality was to conform to the equal opportunity model, notes Val Singh, deputy director of the Center for Women Business Leaders at Cranfield University School of Management in Bedfordshire, UK. "The EU has only really been pushing this in the last couple of years as diversity; before that it was very much about equality."

European companies that have instituted diversity programs like those now common in US firms have generally done so only because their American headquarters told them to, says Kandola, whose company has worked with a number of pharmas including Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Pharmacia, and Wyeth BioPharma.

Complicating matters, ethnicity and race are more delicate subjects in Europe than in the United States, where such discussions are a fact of life in many circles. "In many of the European countries there seems to be an unwillingness in the diversity statements to actually talk about ethnicity and race," Singh says. "We found that several very large companies were not collecting ethnic data on the grounds that it was perceived as racist. Without the data you really can't tell if you have a balanced flow-through."

But like it or not, Kandola argues, Europeans are going to have to start talking about these differences. "Diversity is a fact of life, and we're going to have to live with it. We're going to have to learn how to manage a diverse team."