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| Sunday, 4 May 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Women in governance can transform the political agenda Compiled by Jayanthi Liyanage The Platform for Action of the fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, recognized that discriminatory attitudes, high costs and responsibilities at home, discouraged women from entering politics.
Flipping this around, note was taken that women who do come into the political process brought in new priorities and new ideas to the political agenda, closely relating women's experiences in addressing women's concerns, as well as adding diverse interests to the law and policy making solutions, to benefit the whole society. The constitution of Sri Lanka guarantees the equality of women and forbids discrimination against women. Our women have the right of vote and the freedom to contest at parliamentary, provincial council and local government elections. But this is an equality articulated at a formal and theoretical level, which has failed to promote the exercise of equality in a substantive manner. In other words, women head the state, but rule a patriarchal society. The society where nearly 50 per cent of the population is women, 83 per cent of women are literate and 49 per cent of university entrants are women, is also flawed by a monumental gender imbalance in its mainstream political representation. The intervention, then, should be to move from 'formal equality' to 'substantive equality'. Discrimination Quotas, reservations, preferences, compensatory discrimination or affirmation action programmes for special groups in society, is usually a temporary, short-cut strategy to equip and empower them, through time, to rise to the level of competing equally and effectively with other groups in society. India allows, in its state legislative assemblies, time-specified reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Such special measures, as the Youth Quotas exercised at our local government level, could accelerate the de facto equality between men and women and promote the government's obligation under Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) which we have ratified in 1981. The current low representation of women in national and local politics holds out a major bone of contention to the South Asian societies. Though India's amended electoral laws provide for 33 per cent of those elected at local government level (panchayat) to be women, a Bill to reserve a similar quota in state assemblies and the national legislature, turned the Lok Sabha into a venue of some ugly scenes in 1997. It was a proposal which, rather paternalistically, aimed at creating a set of "women only" constituencies at India's first-past-the-post elections, pitting "women against women", than the more democratic "women against men" contests in the same constituency, possible through our proportional representation system. France's new laws make it mandatory for political parties to have 50 per cent women candidates as a qualification to secure state funds for elections. Women in Sri Lanka today, have four per cent of the seats at parliamentary level, three per cent at provincial level and 1.9 per cent at local government level, which confer on us the 97th place in the world, in terms of parliamentary representation of women, a national scandal indeed! A temporary quota, though not without the danger of creating "token nominations" or "proxy-puppets", and barring "fresh blood" through the domination of wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of previous candidates, could also be the panacea to multiply the number of women in governance, in the short run. Source: Preferring Women by Mario Gomez and Shyamala Gomez. |
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