Women still Trail Men in Politics Worldwide

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Canada still trails many countries in terms of the number of women in parliament. According to the most recent Inter-Parliamentary Union statistics, their share in the House of Commons stands at 30.5 per cent, placing the country at 58th place on the global list of the countries with the highest share of women in their national legislature. (The unelected Senate has almost equal male and female representation.)

The United States is worse: the House of Representatives stands at 27.3 per cent, the Senate at 25 per cent, giving the country 67th place in the rankings.

Rwanda is first with its lower house 61.3 per cent female as of January 2022. Cuba has the second highest share of women in its legislature at 53.4 per cent, while third place belongs to Nicaragua, at 50.6 per cent.  Exactly half of the legislators in Mexico and the United Arab Emirates are female. All of these countries also have gender parity laws in place for their national assemblies.

New Zealand, in sixth place at 49.2 per cent, uses a system called mixed member proportional representation (MMP), in which voters pick their representatives by district, but also vote for a political party. If the elected representatives shares and the overall party vote do not match up, the parliament is enlarged until it represents the party vote, effectively handing more power over to the parties to pick out who becomes an MP.

In Iceland, seventh at 47.6, parties also drive gender party with all four major parties enacting voluntary quotas to achieve between 40 and 50 per cent of women represented in roles within the party and on electoral lists. Grenada and South Africa, at 46.7, and Andorra at 46.4, round out the top ten.

In the 48 countries that had parliamentary elections in 2021, women candidates won 28.6 per cent of the new seats, a cumulative improvement of 2.1 percentage points compared to previous elections.

Among the 30 countries that had some form of quota in place for the single or lower house in 2021, 31.9 per cent of MPs elected were women, compared to 19.5 per cent in countries with no form of quotas.

Two countries have elected women presidents for the first time in their history: Xiomara Castro de Zelaya in Honduras and Samiha Suluhu in Tanzania. And Samoa elected Naomi Mata’afa as its first woman prime minister. As of 2022, 26 women are serving as heads of state and or government in 24 countries.

There is evidence that women’s participation in political decision making improves the quality of life for people. Generally, male lawmakers are less likely to pass laws that serve women’s and children’s interests. Men less often think about rape, domestic violence, women’s health, and child care.

For example, India discovered that the number of drinking water projects in areas with women-led councils was 62 per cent higher than in those with dominated by men. In Norway, there was a direct causal relationship between the presence of women in municipal councils and childcare coverage was found.

But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story, as Rwanda demonstrates. In pre-genocide Rwanda, it was almost unheard of for women to own land or take a job outside the home.

 The 1994 genocide changed all that. Rwanda was forced to implement sweeping changes and open society to women. The call for equality was led by President Paul Kagame. So the country’s new constitution, passed in 2003, decreed that 30 per cent of parliamentary seats be reserved for women.

But no matter how powerful these women became in public, that didn’t extend into their own homes. Women were still expected to perform domestic duties. Political culture has lagged far behind constitutional mandates.

Cuba also has not made as much progress in achieving gender equality in political decision making as some of the official data would indicate, and women continue to be largely excluded from the most important political bodies.

Cuban women in political positions grow fewer and fewer the further up you go among the ranks and levels of importance, keeping women within local and provincial positions which make less impactful decisions. So there too there is less than meets the eye.