The empowerment and advancement of women

Posted: 2010-03-08

On the surface, 2010 may look like a good year for women in democratic political systems around the world.

Laura Chinchilla has just celebrated victory as the first female President of Costa Rica and Michelle Bachelet concludes five successful years as the first female President of Chile. In Europe, Angela Merkel enters her fifth year as German Chancellor. In Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been President of Liberia since 2006, while in Asia, Sheikh Hasina Wazed was elected Prime Minister of Bangladesh for the second time in 2009.

At the same time, such headline-grabbing achievements of women attaining executive power mask a global reality of lack of representation of women in political life and the exclusion of women from democratic decision-making processes. Each of these women elected to high office faced a series of obstacles to women’s participation in democracy which are still alive and well despite their victories. Their success is the exception rather than the rule and women remain far from equally represented in executives, legislatures and political parties.

When the leaders of the G20, representing the 20 largest economies in the world and about 90% of global economic output, met to discuss the global economic crisis in Pittsburgh last autumn, only 2 of them were women. This despite the fact that women represent those disproportionally affected by the global economic downturn and represent 70% of the world’s poor according to the UN. In the political and security sphere, none of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have an elected female head of government – this despite the fact that women suffer adversely the effects of conflicts and have an enormous untapped potential in terms of peace building efforts.

In terms of parliamentary representation, the situation is equally bleak. Although comprising 50% of the global population, women represent globally only 18.7% of elected representatives, a figure which drops to less than 10% in the Arab region. Rwanda – with the help of gender quotas – is the only country in the world in which woman are equally represented in Parliament.

As we mark the 15-year anniversary of the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on equality, we might ask what happened to the ambitious commitments made in Beijing by governments on achieving gender balance and removing the obstacles which discriminate against women attaining decision-making positions. In fact, in the area of gender equality, there is no shortage of international ambitious commitments and goals, landmark resolutions, far-reaching declarations, agreements, platforms and conventions.

This gap between the rhetoric of commitment to women’s empowerment and gender equality and the reality on the ground is stunning. The implementation of commitments remains uneven and incomplete around the world and we still have a marathon road ahead of us in achieving gender equality. At the end of the day, the political will seems to be missing at the highest levels to challenge the entrenched notions of male domination of power, decision-making processes and political parties.

The basic lesson is that we must work harder together in the international community to ensure that this road we are travelling towards gender equality does not end up in a cul de sac. International IDEA believes that the objective of achieving gender equality is indivisible from the goal of achieving sustainable democracy. The intersection between democracy and gender is of profound importance to sustainable democracy, not only because gender equality is an important goal in its own right, but also because gender equality is vital to democracy. If women comprise half the population of the world, then political systems which represent the people must also contain equal representation of women.

At the same time, we must move beyond the quantitative discussion of the numbers of women involved at different levels of political life. For example, gender quotas can be effective tools to move towards equal numbers of men and women in parliament, but they do not address underlying issues of discrimination, exclusion and non-participation. To achieve the aim of equal distribution of power and influence between women and men as a pillar of democracy, we must facilitate the conditions and opportunities for both women and men to participate fully in social, economic and political progress, and this is where the real change lies.

International IDEA has a strong gender perspective in all of our work and mainstreams gender as a cross-cutting issue in all of our programmes. Through our country programmes in Nepal, Bolivia, Sudan and Liberia among others, we work to support women’s participation in political life by training female candidates, supporting women’s caucuses and working for the principles of inclusion and gender equality, in particular through cooperation with political parties.

At the same time, we know that all change must start at home. In our own organization, we are working to ensure that gender equality objectives are reflected in our management and administration systems and that gender underpins not only our programme areas of work, but also our management practices and accountability systems. I must acknowledge that we still have a way to go along our own road before achieving our objectives in this area.

This issue of the IDEA newsletter highlights many of the important areas in which IDEA works towards achieving gender equality. I am particularly pleased to have an interview with one of the new members of the International IDEA Board of Advisors, Margot Wallström, who is the first ever Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence and Conflict, and whose tremendous expertise and experience in the area of gender equality we hope will greatly enhance International IDEA’s own work in this field.