Inter-Parliamentary Union

Seventh meeting of women speakers of parliament,
New Delhi (India), 3 - 4 October 2012

Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and Speaker of India's lower house of parliament host the 7th IPU Meeting of Women Speakers.
Source: Indian Parliament.

By Jemini Pandya, Delhi
4 October 2012

Women speakers of parliament from around the world have committed to doing more to increase women’s representation in parliament and its formal decision-making bodies.

Concluding a two-day IPU meeting in the Indian capital, New Delhi, focusing on making parliaments more gender sensitive, the group of 13 women speakers adopted the New Delhi Initiative for Gender Sensitive Parliaments.

Amongst other things, it recognized that as speakers of parliament, they played a crucial role in spearheading efforts to make both parliaments and, through legislation, society too, more gender sensitive.

With continuing low levels of women’s representation in parliament, a global average of just 20 per cent, the group of women speakers from African, European and Asian countries have agreed to promote women’s representation in parliament and its structures.

They also committed to efforts to realize the full potential of women’s political participation; place gender equality high on the parliamentary agenda, improve the parliamentary working environment and undertake initiatives to share the responsibility for gender equality with men.

The Initiative highlights several ways to meet these objectives, including putting in place action plans on supporting electoral laws and temporary special measures to increase representation, facilitating greater women’s participation on parliamentary committees, revising internal policies, rules and codes of conduct to meet the gender needs of parliament and ensuring gender equality issues are debated in parliament.

The woman speakers also looked at their role in supporting and mentoring other women, both those who are MPs or who want to be one.

During the meeting that ended on Thursday 5th October, participants also spoke of the challenges of their post as speaker and how they deal with them as women. Sharing and learning from each other’s experiences will feature in future IPU meetings of women speakers.

The New Delhi Initiative comes just a few weeks before a plan of action on gender sensitive parliaments will be adopted at the 127th IPU Assembly in Quebec City, Canada.

Transforming Parliament to Redress the Gender Deficit

By Jemini Pandya, Delhi
3 October 2012

The key issues of women's access to parliament and to internal parliamentary structures kicked off an engaged and lively debate at the 7th IPU Meeting of Women Speakers of Parliament in New Delhi on 3rd October.

The issue of quotas or special measures to increase the numbers of women in parliament raised again the question of whether such measures helped or hindered women politicians. For Botswana, there is no question that quotas or special measures are desperately needed. For Speaker Nasha Nnananyana, the fact that her parliament hosts only a couple of women MPs is a desperately sad fact. "Women are completely absent from parliament," she told her fellow women Speakers. The priority had to be in redressing this fundamental imbalance before other gender-related work in parliament could begin she stressed.

Although a milestone has been reached in women's participation in parliament in 2012, with one in five MPs in the world now being women, the statistic falls far short of the 50 per cent that women represent in the global population.

The two-day meeting, officially opened by Indian President Pranab Mukherjee at an inaugural ceremony in the grand and historic setting of the Lok Sabha (lower house) chamber and hosted by Speaker of the Lok Sabha Meira Kumar, is focused on how to transform women's political participation by sensitizing parliaments to gender issues.

In addition to how to increase the numbers of women MPs, the meeting, which brought together 13 women speakers from around the world, is looking at ways to change the structures and working methods of parliament to make them more gender sensitive.

The issue of child care facilities within parliaments, working times, and gender policies such as on parental leave or on sexual harassment and how these can help create an environment that would help women want to work in parliament, were also discussed. It allowed for an exchange of ideas on how to address common challenges.

Austrian Speaker Barbara Prammer spoke of the importance of mentoring women MPs. "Women need to have powerful supporters who can mentor them," she told her counterparts. "Women who have broken the glass ceiling have to take other women with them."

In his inaugural speech, Indian President Mukherjee highlighted how amendments to the Indian Constitution allowing seats on local governance structures and councils to be reserved for women had had a dramatic impact on women's participation in local politics. The act of reserving one third of seats in local bodies for women had brought 800,000 into the political process in a single election, he said. "This is very significant as the gram panchayat (village councils) is, in my view, the best training ground for future parliamentarians," he added. Eleven per cent of India's MPs are women. India had yet to adopt a quota system at national parliament level.

IPU President Abdelwahad Radi told the gathering that he refused to be pessimistic about the levels of women's participation in parliament. He highlighted that the percentage of women speakers – 14 per cent – fared well with the figure for women ministers (16 per cent) and higher than that of women heads of state.

The opening day also saw keynote addresses by IPU Secretary General Anders B. Johnsson and Executive Director of UN Women Michelle Bachelet. Both pressed the need for affirmative action on women's access to parliament.

With democracy fundamentally tied to representation that brought change to all of society, it was not acceptable for half of the world's population to not have an equal voice in the way politics is done and in the political decisions that are taken, Secretary General Johnsson told participants. Parliaments had to respond to the needs and concerns of all of society.

He acknowledged that the Organization was witnessing much change among its 162 members in response to public demand. But women's political representation and making parliaments sensitive to the needs of both men and women was part of a huge challenge. "But it is a challenge that parliaments must take on with verve and commitment," he urged.