What a good week for women in politics. First, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (she’s on the right below) defeated Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz to succeed Ehud Olmert as the head of Kadima, Israel’s ruling party, on Wednesday. Then, preliminary election results on Thursday indicated that Rwanda would become the first country with a female majority in parliament. To mark the occasion, The Economist’s “Daily Chart” section compiled this data on the percentages of women in various parliaments around the world. And today, Friday, the United Nations Development Fund for Women released a report on the same topic, announcing that women now account for 18.4 percent of parliament members worldwide. That number has increased seven percent since 1995, but at the current rate of growth it’ll still take until 2045 for women to reach parity. Shit, that’s 37 years, but still. That’s progress. Would it be wrong for me to quote the Spice Girls when they sing “Girl power is all we need/ We know how we got this far/ Strength and courage and a wonder bra”? No? Not okay?
All right, well, check out this chart.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Esteban Parker (eparker10) // Sep 20, 2008 at 2:00 am
Spain’s like that because it operates off Parity, written into it’s law :O
Although dunno about some of the other places oO
2 Meredith Case (mcase10) // Sep 20, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Yeah, a bunch of countries have some sort of an electoral quota. The NYT reported that in 2007, women held 19.3 percent of seats in countries with quotas and 14.7 percent of seats in countries without quotas. I guess that indicates some effect, but you’d also think that the countries with electoral quotas would be more committed to equality in other ways as well, so it’s probably difficult to determine any sort of causality.
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