Quotas are a crucial factor - but by no means the only one - in increasing women's participation in national parliaments, the IPU says in a report marking International Women's Day
By Maria Caspani
LONDON (TrustLaw) – Women’s representation in parliaments round the world increased by nearly one percentage point in 2012, an advance that highlights the key role of quotas in narrowing the gender gap in politics, an international parliamentary group said on Tuesday.
Women had an average of 20.3 percent of the seats in parliaments at the end of 2012, up from 19.5 percent in 2011, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). This is almost double the average rate of increase in recent years of 0.5 percent, the group said.
Women in Senegal, Algeria and East Timor had the highest proportion of seats, Algeria being the first and only Arab country to have women in more than 30 percent of the seats, the IPU said in its annual report released ahead of International Women's Day.
Algeria is unique in a region "which failed to deliver on the promise of democratic change in the Arab Spring countries,” notably in Egypt and Libya, the report added.
The IPU said the increase in the presence of women MPs in some of the 48 countries that held elections last year was due largely to the adoption of quotas - whether legislated or voluntary.
Nine of the 10 countries which had the highest proportion of elected women in their lower house of parliament had used quotas, while seven of the nine lower houses that saw a decrease in women MPs’ representation did not use a quota system.
“Although quotas remain contentious in some parts of the world, they remain key to progress on a fundamental component of democracy - gender parity in political representation,” IPU secretary general Anders B. Johnsson said in a statement. “There can be no claim to democracy without delivering on this.”
But quotas alone are not enough to ensure gender parity in politics, the IPU said. Ambitious legislation, political commitment, sanctions for non-compliance and putting women in winnable positions also weigh significantly.
This last point echoes, indirectly, the criticism many rights groups and organisations made of the new electoral laws of some Arab Spring countries, which allowed political parties to place women at the bottom of electoral lists, making it considerably harder, in some cases impossible, for them to win seats.
AMERICAS LEAD THE WAY
It was a record parliamentary year for women in the Americas, where they held an average 24.1 percent of all seats, the highest regional average in the world.
The United States - among the top scorers with El Salvador, Jamaica and Mexico - had the largest number of women candidates in its history in 2012.
In Africa, women now hold 42.7 percent of the seats in Senegal's parliament, a far higher percentage than in the United States where women account for 18 percent of the House of Representatives.
Moreover, Sub-Saharan Africa now has four parliaments in the IPU’s top ten for women’s representation.
Europe's regional average of 23.2 percent indicates steady progress over the last decade, the IPU said.
The only region where there has been no progress is the Pacific with a regional average of 15.3 percent compared with 15.2 percent 10 years ago.
Progress in Asia is also slow, the report said, apart from the success of East Timor where the number of women MPs increased by 10.8 percent
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