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Gender-less democracies

Women hold just 18 per cent of Parliament seats worldwide

UNITED NATIONS: Women hold just over 18 per cent of the seats in parliaments around the world. This represents a 60 per cent increase since 1995 but it is still a long way to go to achieve equality with men in national legislative bodies, the Inter-Parliamentary Union has said in its annual report card.

“We still feel that progress is slow,” said Philippines Senator Pia Cayetano, President of the IPU committee of women parliamentarians. She stressed that on average fewer than one in five legislators is a woman.

“The challenges that women face in accessing politics are immense,” she told a news conference. “Prejudices and cultural perceptions about the role of society are among the greatest obstacles to women’s entry.”

During 2008, parliamentary elections and renewals took place in 54 countries and women’s representation increased to 18.3 per cent — up from 17.7 per cent last year and 11.3 per cent in 1995, the IPU report said.

The U.N. Economic and Social Council had set a target of having a minimum of 30 per cent women lawmakers in all parliaments by 1995. The U.N. women’s conference in Beijing in 1995 noted that little progress had been made in achieving that target, and the IPU and many women’s groups started promoting the election of female legislators.

According to the IPU, 15 per cent of parliamentary chambers reached the 30 per cent goal for the first time in 2008. That translates to 39 out of 264 chambers in 32 countries. Forty per cent of those chambers are in Europe, 33 per cent in Africa and 23 per cent in Latin America, the report said.

Lowest levels

At the other end of the spectrum, 25 per cent of parliamentary chambers have less than 10 per cent women members. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Micronesia have never had a woman as an MP.

“It is unfortunate that we are not seeing progress being made across all parliaments of the world,” IPU President Theo-Ben Gurirab said in a statement. “While there were some impressive gains made in 2008, particularly in Africa, where Rwanda’s lower house elected a majority of women members, more needs to be done in those countries where women are largely absent from decision-making bodies.”

Rose Mukantabana, Speaker of Rwanda’s Chamber of Deputies which is the only body to have a majority of women members — 56.3 per cent — told reporters that the high female representation is the result of a quota of 30 per cent of seats set aside for women and the large number of widows in the country following the 1994 genocide. “We represent more than 50 percent of the whole population,” she said of women, explaining that many were killed in the mass slaughter. “After the genocide, [women] are more engaged in the public arena than in the past. Because of our culture, in the past, women were not prevalent in public life.”

Of the 2,656 seats that went to women in 2008, the IPU said 1,707 women were directly elected, 878 were indirectly elected and 71 were appointed.

Some gains

Latin American women registered “some impressive gains,” taking a 26.5 per cent share of seats in the 12 chambers that were renewed — largely due to the success of women candidates in Cuba, Belize and Grenada.

In the U.S., both houses of Congress elected their highest proportions of women members — 17 per cent in each chamber, the report said. But that’s still ranks the U.S. below the global average.

Europe, with Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands ranked in the top five countries for women in parliament, sustained its “consistent pace of progress” with gains in Belarus, Spain, Macedonia, Monaco and France’s upper house, but drops in women’s representative in Romania, Malta and Serbia, the report said.

The IPU said African countries continued to make strides in 2008 with Angola electing more than 37 per cent of women members in its first election since 1992. It joins other southern African countries including Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania which have elected more than 25 per cent of women members to Parliament, the report said.

“Asia has registered the slowest rate of progress in terms of women’s access to parliament over the past 15 years, reaching a regional average of 17.8 per cent,” the IPU said. It cited significant gains in Nepal where women took 32.8 per cent of the seats, a contrast to Iran where women won just 2.8 per cent of seats.

In the Arab world, women took just over 9 per cent of seats, but the lowest percentage of women — less than 4 per cent on average — was in the Pacific island nations, the IPU said. — AP

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