Int'l Women's Day: Handful of Nations Rejects Politics As Usual
By Lisa Söderlindh

March 6, 2006 -(Inter Press Service) Developing countries, particularly those emerging from armed conflict -- like Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq and Liberia -- are doing a better job at integrating women in politics than are most longstanding, established Western democracies, according to the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).

Still, the vast majority of the world's women remain absent from all levels of government, say experts meeting here for the 50th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Although remarkable gains have been made since the Commission was established 60 years ago to advocate women's issues, "the world community still has far to go on actual representation of women at the highest levels of national and international leadership", U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette said at the start of the two-week session here, which ends on Mar. 10.

Women today comprise an average of 16.4 percent of legislators in the upper and lower houses of parliaments. Europe's Nordic countries have consistently held the lead, with an average of 40 percent women legislators as of October 2005.

"Most countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as North America, particularly the United States and Canada, are countries that belong to the category that I would call 'the old democracies'," IPU Secretary-General Anders B. Johnsson told IPS.

"But I see very little debate there, or real efforts being made to emulate the examples that now are being set by the developing countries," he added.

The IPU is an international organisation of parliaments that works for peace and cooperation among peoples and for the firm establishment of representative democracy.

On its latest list of 187 countries ranked by the national percentage of women in their lower or single house of parliament, Canada came in at number 44 with 20.8 percent women, Britain was 50th, the United States was 69th, France was 85th and Italy was 89th.

Meanwhile, Rwanda tops the list with 48.8 percent women in parliament; Iraq ranks number 16 and Burundi number 19. Many countries in Latin America also made significant progress during 2005, according to the IPU.

"It is true what one use to say, in Western Europe at least, that political parties, which are often the basis for how politics are made, are clubs of old men, and they run the parties and institutions that they serve for themselves," Johnsson said.

Looking at political representation from a gender and human rights perspective, "We women are part of democratic society and democracy speaks to leadership by all the people, and for all people. If 50 percent of the people are not being involved in leadership, then clearly, one cannot speak of having democracy," Ingrid Charles Gumbs, director of gender affairs for the Caribbean state of St. Kitts and Nevis, told IPS.

"When thinking about the whole world, with 16 percent women in parliament, this is ridiculous," she said. "Think of countries like mine, St. Kitts, in which we have highly capable women, but yet no single woman in parliament, except for the speaker of the parliament."

Sophia Abdi Noor, an NGO representative from Kenya, emphasised the cost of women not being heard or represented at the policy-making level. "My unique issues as a woman are not reaching this level, because there is no one there to understand or listen to such issues," she told IPS.

"And when there are no policies that accommodate women's role in society, when my own government sees me as a second-class citizen and discriminates against my rights as a woman, whom am I going to turn to?"

Despite international treaties stressing women's participation in decision-making processes, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979, "To me, and back home, those are just instruments that stay on the paper and in the boardrooms, nothing more than that," Abdi Noor said.

More than 10 years ago, heads of state meeting at the U.N.'s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing agreed that women must account for a critical mass of at least 30 percent of parliamentarians. Since then, the total number of women in parliaments has grown by 50 percent, but only 20 countries have reached the target.

At this rate, the 30 percent quota will not be met until 2025, and equal representation is even further off, according to the IPU.

"If we continue to progress at the same level, it will take us at least one or two generations before we are really reaching anything like parity," Johnsson told IPS.

While the number of parliaments with no women at all actually increased during 2005, some of the largest gains seen this year -- in developing countries and in several Latin American countries -- can partly be attributed to the adoption of quotas for women.

Of the 39 countries that held elections in 2005 for lower or single houses of parliament, 15 implemented special measures such as voluntary quotas (New Zealand, Norway, Poland and Portugal), legislated political party quotas (Argentina, Bolivia, Burundi, Honduras, Liberia and Venezuela) and reserved seats or mandates (Afghanistan and Tanzania).

"Gender quotas are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for obtaining gender balance in parliament, but as long as discrimination of women and inequality persists, quotas [are necessary]", said Swedish professor Drude Dahlerup, who led the first global study of gender quotas in politics.

She pointed to the successful use of quotas in some post-conflict countries like Rwanda, where 30 percent of the seats in parliament were set aside for female legislators in the 2003 elections. As a result, women went from less than 15 percent of legislators to nearly 49 percent -- unseating Sweden as the highest-ranking country in terms of women's representation in parliament.

In Sweden, where party quotas are voluntary, the struggle to reach the current total of more than 45 percent women in parliament took more than 50 years.

"I think the key issue is to enable women to work and have a home, and a family. And that is possible through good child care, good elderly care, individual taxation, all these changes that were brought about in the 1970's in Sweden," Jens Orback, Sweden's minister for gender equality, told IPS.

In the end, Orback said, it is not just a question of women, "It's a question of gender, and it's important that men are also engaged in gender equality."

From: http://allafrica.com/stories/200603070008.html