Parliaments with a higher percentage of women tend to pass more laws on education, health and social protection, says UN Women official
BANGKOK (TrustLaw) - Countries need to put more women in parliament if they want to achieve gender equality and promote women’s rights, a top official with the United Nations’ agency for women has said.
This is because parliaments are responsible for bringing in laws that are critical to changing the situation of women, John Hendra, deputy executive director of UN Women, told journalists on Wednesday in Bangkok at the end of a visit to Thailand, Myanmar and Laos.
“Evidence shows that parliaments that have a much higher percentage of women tend to pass more laws on education, on health, on social protection,” he said.
“It's very good to have women leaders, but it's as good to have (as many) women legislators and lawmakers as possible because… you get more progressive laws,” he added.
Thailand has its first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, who assumed office last year. But in 2011, women made up only 15 percent of MPs, 16 percent of senators and 17 percent of senior civil service positions, despite outnumbering men in the civil service.
Myanmar - where female opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is a widely admired household name - ranks 134 out of 143 in the world for female participation in parliament, the lowest in Southeast Asia.
Despite the prominence of a few female leaders, low participation of women in politics is the norm in Asia-Pacific.
QUOTAS
According to a recent report from the U.N. Development Programme, half of the more than 4.2 billion people living in the region are female, yet just over 18 percent of national parliament members are women.
This applies even to the more developed democracies – in contrast to the conventional view that democratisation strengthens gender equality and female empowerment.
Legislatures in Japan and Korea, two of Asia’s most developed countries, have only 11.3 percent and 14.7 percent women members respectively. But almost one third of the parliament in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, is made up of women.
The United Nations set a target of having women hold 30 percent of decision-making positions, including in legislative bodies, as long ago as 1995.
"(This benchmark) has been attained in 32 countries, and 26 of those attained that level because of quotas,” Hendra said, adding that quotas should only be used as a temporary special measure.
Hendra said he had spoken with officials and legislators in Myanmar about considering a quota system for female parliamentarians in the 2015 general election.
NEW DEVELOPMENT GOALS
2015 is also the deadline for meeting the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs, a set of eight global targets that range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Work has now begun to determine their replacement, widely referred to as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Hendra said the SDGs should have specific targets to address gender issues, as well as bringing women’s rights and equality into the mainstream.
"We do feel very strongly that the next agenda should be human rights-based,” he said. “So it should look at issues of inequality, of discrimination, of inclusion, of participation and accountability, and having an agenda where the governments are really accountable to the people.”
As well as specific, ambitious goals for gender equality and women's empowerment, the rest of the targets should have “really robust indicators in terms of gender, and the situation of women and women's rights", Hendra added.
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