Global Policy Forum

Despite elected parliaments, most nations will not be real democracies until women get their due place in the political system, said a report released here Thursday by the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

Ensuring political representation by women will also reduce corruption in public life, added the report, called 'Progress of the World's Women 2000'.

The lack of political voice by women is a key reason why governments have not kept their promises in the past 15 years to bridge the gulf between men and women in education, work and political power, said the report.

Only Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have kept these promises made in international conferences and documents in the past years. Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands and South Africa are close to reaching these goals, said the UNIFEM survey.

The report took stock of progress since the eighties toward these goals -- ensuring gender equality in secondary education, earmarking at least 30 percent seats for women in parliament and having women hold half of paid jobs in industry and services.

These goals have been spelt out in a series of world conferences since the mid-eighties, which included the 1993 Vienna conference on human rights, the 1994 Cairo conference on population, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

The UNIFEM report cited a 1999 World Bank study which found that governments that gave greater say to women were associated with lower levels of corruption.

According to the bank's study, women decision-makers in government are more concerned about the public good than their male counterparts. This has been proven in Thailand, where women-headed village development panels make much better use of the annual 100,000 baht (about 2,500 U.S. dollars) government grant for each hamlet, said Supatra Masdit, minister to the Thai Prime Minister's Office.

Speaking at the UNIFEM report's launch, Supatra agreed with the report's finding that the South-east Asian nation's impressive success in eradicating the gender gap in education will not be of much use unless it is matched by strides in the other two areas -- equality in paid work and in political representation.

''While Thailand's female literacy ranks among the region's highest, Thai women are hugely underrepresented in the political world and often exploited in the economy,'' noted the report. The situation was not much different in most other developing nations, it added.

Only eight nations, most of them Scandinavian, have reached the globally agreed target of women occupying at least 30 percent of seats in national parliaments. Women make up at least a tenth of national lawmakers in less than 80 nations, mostly in North America, Europe and Latin America.

In South-east and East Asia, only Vietnam, China, Lao, North Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia have at least 10 percent women members of parliament.

The survey found ''dramatic falls'' in women's share of seats in parliament in Eastern Europe and Mongolia because of the elimination of gender quotas in the past 15 years. The most ''dramatic increase'' was in South Africa -- from one to 30 percent -- following the end of apartheid.

However, the UNIFEM survey noted that it was not enough for women to be elected to parliament as ''the power to make decisions about economic policy has moved elsewhere.'' This is why it was important for women to be in key positions in decision making bodies like financial ministries and central banks, said the report.

However, women are often reluctant to step forward, according to the report. ''Many fear the hostility, sometimes organised, which they will almost certainly face, while others are reluctant to take on additional responsibilities owing to their obligations to take care of family and neighbours,'' it observed.

It advised men to ''take a greater share of caring responsibilities and take pride in the public accomplishments of their wives and daughters.'' Much greater gains have been made in some parts of the world in giving women greater representation in local politics.

The report gave the example of India, where a constitutional guarantee of one-third seats to women in elected village councils has led to the election of nearly a million local women leaders. Uganda has also constitutionally earmarked 33 percent of seats in local councils for women.

The report also faulted governments for not matching commitments made to reaching the three goals with hiked spending. ''The expenditure targeted at women's programmes is almost invariably a very small proportion of total government expenditure, typically no more than five percent,'' it said.

It was worrying that the ''remaining 95 percent'' of government expenditure was ''not gender neutral,'' it added. Thus, in many countries because more boys than girls attend school, it is boys who benefit from expenditures for general education.

However, since the beginning of this year, 20 nations have undertaken ''gender-sensitive budget initiatives'' that take into account the impact government spending has on women.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.