A few weeks after being appointed to the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality on 20 July 2004, Bloom told an interviewer that, "no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age." Around the same time, he said that "I just don't think clean behind the fridge enough" and that "I am here to represent Yorkshire women who always have dinner on the table when you get home." Bloom told BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme that his comments were "said for fun" to illustrate a more serious point, that equal-rights legislation was, he claimed, putting women out of work.