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While the goal of gender equality has been lauded in many international agreements, including the Millennium Development Goals, many governments lack meaningful female participation. Increased representation of women in governmental institutions and decision-making bodies is crucial for the overall empowerment of women, especially their inclusion in decision making about issues besides those that are traditionally known as “women’s issues,” such as child and elder care and reproductive health. The 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women recommended many programs for this purpose, but recent data indicate that the process has been slow and has achieved uneven results worldwide.
The Beijing Conference recommended that the international community and civil society (including non-governmental organizations and the private sector) take strategic action in order to reduce inequality between men and women in power-sharing and decision-making.
Building on the idea that segments of the population will be best served when they are represented in decision-making bodies, the World Economic Forum created the Women Leaders Initiative (WEF) in 2002 to increase the participation of women in the global economy by increasing their representation by women leaders at global summits. WEF said it hoped to “foster leadership and integrate women into a global dialogue and reinforce efforts to identify, inspire and encourage women to work together.”
Many international conferences have agreed to the target of reaching 30 percent representation of women in government. In 2009, women accounted for 19 percent of all members in parliaments, a 67 percent gain since 1995.
Twenty-six countries have reached the 30 percent mark in 2010 (for one or both houses) including: Rwanda, Sweden, Cuba, Finland, Argentina, the Netherlands, Denmark, Costa Rica, Spain, Norway, Belgium, Mozambique, Nepal, Iceland, New Zealand, South Africa, Angola, Germany, Uganda, Burundi, Belarus, Tanzania, Guyana, Andorra, Ecuador, and Macedonia.9 Many of these seats are attributed to political measures such as quotas that were adopted on a voluntary basis. There are 77 countries that have set quotas for women’s political participation.10 The graph displays proportion of seats held by women in 2010 and 2000 (Source: http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/
Progress2010/MDG_Report_2010_En.pdf).
There are more dimensions to increasing women’s representation, however, than simply seats available to them. First, the UN admits that it is difficult to produce global estimates of the degree to which women’s positions in public leadership have been increased, and that any quantitative study cannot cover the breadth of women’s involvement in decision making. Secondly, securing parliamentary seats through quotas does not mean that the women who assume these positions are fully prepared for them or are aware that gaining a seat is only the first part of a long process of securing women’s equality.
The case of women’s representation in the new Bulgarian parliament is a good example of this problem. Initially, the representation of women in the Bulgarian parliament was credited to the active campaigning by women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the liberal politics of the new political party, the National Movement for Simeon II (NMSII) (a party that called for the return of the monarchy) that won 43 percent of the seats in the 2001 parliamentary election. The Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation (BGRF) and the Women’s Alliance for Development campaigned for more women in parliament through rallies and organized meetings with parliamentarians of all the parties.
During the elections in 2001, the NMSII campaign accepted the movement’s position and placed women in 40 percent of eligible positions, after the elections in which women secured 26.2 percent of the vote. After the election, however, a BGRF study “found that women in parliament were not fully prepared for their careers. They did not see themselves representing women’s interests, nor did they see themselves as having common interests with each other. NGOs will need to continue to work with the new women parliamentarians to bring women’s issues higher up on their agendas.”
Currently there are female leaders in only 20 countries, including the presidents of Costa Rica and Switzerland, who were elected in 2010.11 Click here to view the latest statistics of the percentage of women represented in national parliaments by country in 2011.
Click here for an article on the status of women in Africa.
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