Women in Parliaments: 'If we want to change society we need power'
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Version 0 of 1. “If we want to change society, we need power.” That was how Pia Elda Locatelli, who sits in the Italian parliament, summed up why she and 400 other MPs from around the world were in Addis Ababa this week talking about why more women should be in politics. Research published last year by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Melinda Marshall highlighted women’s need to find meaning and purpose in their work. Locatelli, one of more than 400 parliamentarians at the Women in Parliaments conference in the Ethiopian capital, couldn’t agree more. She believes too many women still perceive power as negative. Instead, she suggests, women should understand the huge positive benefit of power: the ability to obtain resources that can change societies and make a real difference to lives. “If we clarify the meaning of power we can have a positive meaning for it and we can share it,” she says. The bustling city of Addis was an appropriate venue for the conference as it’s the final resting place of one of the UK’s foremost suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst, who came to Ethiopia in 1956 and is buried in front of the city’s Holy Trinity Cathedral. Pankhurst herself might be amazed at the progress of women in politics since they won the vote in the UK in 1918, less than 100 years ago. Women now hold 22.1% of the world’s parliamentary seats. That still, of course, leaves them in a substantial minority. The focus in Addis was pragmatic and non party political. The particpants wanted to share practical measures to force those numbers up, to dismantle the barriers women still face getting to leadership roles and to gather evidence on what women are doing with power when they get it. Barriers to female advancement are still in place, in the political world as much as everywhere else. A recent WIP/World Bank study found that social roles and expectations continue to shrink the pool of female political candidates. Even if they get elected, the bad news continues: “Once in office, gendered roles and expectations continue to dog female legislators, capping ambitions as surely as they stunt their success,” says the report. Woman after woman at this conference called for women to be seen in every role in government: in defence, foreign affairs and finance, not just education and health. The report says systematic effort is needed by national and international networks of female MPs to identify and cultivate talent, provide training in public speaking, learn how to handle the media, build fundraising networks and deepen policy understanding. Related: What to expect from the Women in Parliaments Summit 2015 Mentoring, quotas and affirmative action are just some of the tools being used around the world to get more women into parliaments. Norway is helping fund Malawian female political candidates and the main political parties in Ghana have introduced half-price registration for female candidates. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, chair of the African Union and former home affairs minister in South Africa, herself a proud beneficiary of the country’s affirmative action programme, has no truck with the idea that quotas produce inferior candidates. “People say that quotas bring token women,” she said. “But I think quotas focus the mind to find the women. If you don’t have a quota, you’re not obliged, so you don’t find them.” Related: Forget flexibility. What working women really want is power Contradictions remain. More female MPs doesn’t always translate into women’s empowerment. Kasthuri Patto, an opposition member of the Malaysian parliament, described her own experience of this. She recently visited a country where she was welcomed as a member of parliament for serious discussion of how to increase women in power. “But when I stepped out on the street, my head high, with no headscarf, everyone stared at me,” she said. And when female politicians speak up in favour of progressive policies, they are often excoriated and accused of ignoring realpolitik. That was the recent fate of Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallstrom when she criticised Saudi Arabia’s policies on women. Wallstrom has been at the centre of a storm for daring to act on an explicitly feminist foreign policy. The irony, according to Swedish delegates in Addis, is that her predecessor, a man, used very similar terms. But no firestorm descended on his head. With much still to do, it was a shame that there were no representatives from the US, Canada or Australia. There were two UK MEPs, but no members from Westminster. Perhaps members of all these parliaments feel they have nothing to learn from their counterparts around the world. If so, it was their loss: they missed the chance to debate why gross national happiness matters more than GDP with a minister from Bhutan, or meet Julie Soso Akeke, a member of parliament in Papua New Guinea, who flew halfway round the world to be at the conference. Sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday. Follow us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic |