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POLITICS-LATIN AMERICA:
Gender Equality Requires Quotas
By Tito
Drago
MADRID (IPS) - Laws stipulating a minimum
number of women in public posts are essential for
achieving gender equality, according to a meeting of
women legislators from Latin America and the
Caribbean, held this week in Madrid.
The meeting, "Towards a Political Agenda for Gender
Equality in Latin America and the Caribbean", was
organised by the Spanish Agency for International
Development Cooperation (AECID) and the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with support
from the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
More than 60 women parliamentarians from 20
countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a
further 20 from Spain, attended the two-day
conference, which ended Tuesday.
Eleven of the 20 Latin American and Caribbean
nations represented at the meeting already have
quota laws, whose effectiveness can be seen in the
proportion of women lawmakers, who held 20.5 percent
of total seats in 2008, compared to just 14 percent
in the other nine countries.
Argentina adopted the world's first national gender
quota law in 1991, and this country and others in
the region such as Chile, Nicaragua and Panama have
or have had women presidents.
Without these laws, it would take until 2052 for
women to gain 40 percent of parliamentary seats,
said Rebeca Grynspan, UNDP regional director for
Latin America and the Caribbean.
But none of these countries has reached the degree
of equality that prevails in Spain, which has equal
numbers of men and women in the cabinet presided by
socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero, and where political parties are required
to include at least 40 percent female candidates on
electoral lists.
Latin America has made some progress in the
composition of cabinets: in the 1990s only nine
percent of ministers were women, a proportion that
has climbed to nearly 22 percent this year. A
particularly positive sign is that women are
increasingly being appointed to ministries
traditionally seen as male preserves, such as the
ministries of defence, interior, economy, industry,
science and technology.
Spain's First Vice President María Teresa Fernández
de la Vega told the meeting it must never be
forgotten that exercising and showing the value of
political freedom is a contribution to the values of
equality throughout Ibero-America - the community of
Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries on both
sides of the Atlantic.
"There are still many doors to be opened and many
seats in parliament to be occupied" by women, who
should have "at least half, fifty percent, in all
the world's governments," she said.
Fernández de la Vega called on participants to
conquer a public space in which women can be part of
the solutions to the global economic crisis. "Today,
women are part of politics, we are a central element
and we continue to claim the public space that we
should always have occupied," she said.
UNIFEM executive director Inés Alberdi stressed the
need for "accountability from a gender perspective"
in politics, the justice system, public services and
the markets, "to ensure that policies on women's
rights do not remain empty rhetoric."
This accountability, she went on, should be
structured in such a way that "women themselves can
demand and get answers from the decision-makers, at
the national and international levels."
Although women do not yet have equal participation
at the legislative level in Latin America and the
Caribbean, significant progress has been made in the
proportion of women lawmakers in lower (or single)
chambers, currently an average of nearly 21 percent.
The highest proportion of women in such posts is
found in Cuba (49 percent), followed by Argentina
(40 percent) and Costa Rica (nearly 37 percent),
while the lowest participation is found in Colombia
(8.4 percent), Panama (8.5 percent), Brazil (nine
percent) and Guatemala (12 percent). However, in
local governments women's presence is much lower.
Only six percent of mayors are women.
The women parliamentarians gathered in Madrid laid
the foundations for a legislative agenda on gender
equality issues for the region, and strategies to
make it effective.
They emphasised that women's leadership is a key to
development with a view to overcoming the global
economic crisis. Proposals were also made focusing
on employment, social protection, and shared
responsibility for personal and family life and work
outside the home, as well as for sexual and
reproductive health. |
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