Site of the Month:
European Stability Initiative (ESI) is a site where you can find reports on South Eastern Europe and European enlargement Policy. Recent projects are about the situation in Turkey and EU policy on Visa-Free Travel for the Western Balkan.
Quarterly theme: Women in Europe
One hundred years ago, in 1907, women entered parliament for the first time in world history. After elections nineteen female parliamentarians stepped into the Finnish parliament. Finland was in 1906 also the first country that gave women active as well as passive voting rights. What is the situation of women in politics in 2008? An overview of women in parliament, female heads of state, and female prime ministers and ministers.
Though most in Ireland are now materially better off than 20 years ago, inequality has also been rising. Recent figures from the Central Statistics Office revealed a hidden gender dimension in this regard: the proportion of the Irish population at risk of poverty has declined, but the only people for whom it has increased are children and lone parents – the latter overwhelmingly women.
This article considers two interlinked reasons for why this is happening: low levels of women’s participation in government policy-making and legislation, and the consequent inadequacy of government responses to address the particular issues facing women in Ireland.
Established in 1907, the Icelandic Women’s Rights Association (IWRA) was the first formal organisation of Icelandic women focusing its efforts on the struggle for political equality between men and women, as well as equal opportunities in education and profession. On IWRA´s 100th anniversary the association can look back on many victories and goals that have been reached but still there are continuing gender inequality issues to fight for. In spite of all the years and efforts, IWRA will operate “…until full gender equality is reached”, as the association’s slogan goes.
Equality between women and men is an important point when we talk about fundamental rights of people in our Community. We have to assure equal possibilities for personal and intellectual development, equal criteria for evaluation of achieved results, we need to form the same conditions for awarding, etc. These are just a few necessary steps to pursue our common democratic, sustainable and coherent goals.
What does the situation in Slovenia look like?
The situation in Slovenia is not brilliant, though it is not really bad either. The conditions are marked through a mix of different influences; from the old socialist times and modern European oriented steps that Slovenia took some years ago. Socialist era has marked our society with well-developed educational, health and kindergarten systems. These are the preliminary conditions for the creation of a good basis for equal development in the activities of women in all fields of society.
According to the Croatian Constitution, gender equality is one of the highest values of legal order in Croatia. Article 15 of Gender Equality Act arranges the area concerning the political parties and aims at balancing the place of women and men in bodies of political parties but also on the candidate lists for the parliamentary and local election (for local and regional self-government). National policy for promotion of gender equality is also defining guidelines for achieving the balanced representation of men and women in representative and executive bodies at all levels of government. Additionally, Croatia has established institutional mechanisms for promotion of gender equality in the form of the Office for Gender Equality within the Croatian Government, the Ombudsperson (a woman, actually) for Gender Equality, the local Committees for Gender Equality and the Coordinator for the Gender Equality in the state Government bodies.
Since the war ended in 1999, Kosovar women saw a great opportunity to take the advantage of big international presence in Kosova for having a greater participation in public and political life. Their expectations were connected to international missions for democracy building and respect of human rights as well as international instruments that guarantee the participation of women in all levels of reconstruction and peace building in a war affected country.
It was already very late when I arrived in Rabat on Thursday 6 September. The purpose of my visit was the upcoming elections. With a group of people from all over Europe I was in Morocco to observe the elections. For the first time in history the Moroccan government allowed MRE’s (Marocain résident à l’étranger) to take part in the elections as international observers. The next morning, Friday 7 September, looked like any ordinary day. The streets were crowded. People rushed to work and students found their way to school. With two of my colleagues I arrived at the first polling station in a local school. The classroom was still empty. We sat in the back and watched people come in and cast their vote. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. I was particularly interested in women’s role in Moroccan politics. During the last elections in 2005 the number of women in parliament was at a historic highpoint. I was very curious to know how these elections would turn out for women.
When Finnish women gained, together with men, a universal and equal right to vote and stand for election in 1906, many believed that a crucial and irreversible change had taken place in relations between women and men and in the attainment of gender equality. A hundred years later, this magical year is still frequently referred to as a milestone that started off a consistent development towards better equality. This process has been marked by various stages of equality and legislative reforms through which women’s political, economic and social rights have been extended. Commonly cited examples of critical events at the turn of the new millennium have been the establishment of quota regulations in the Finnish Equality Act for equal representation of women and men in public preparatory bodies or the election of Tarja Halonen as Finland’s first woman president.
According to the law, women in Slovakia have the same rights as men. They have the right to vote and they can be elected into all decision making bodies at all levels. Nevertheless, female participation in public functions and in the decision-making processes is still very unequal.
The political scene occupied with the heritage of the past requests much more efforts from women and women’s groups than only participation of women in post-war elections. This is the only possibility that the public request for equal opportunities for women in politics might break through patriarchal and traditional autism.
During the communist period equality between men and women was strongly supported, at least at the level of the official ideology. It was one of the important ideas used in the modernization process of Romania during the period after the Second World War. Even though this equality between men and women lead to the phenomena of over-solicitation of women - they became working comrades with men, but were still almost exclusively responsible for the household, education and raising of the children, and for taking care of the family’s elders - the model that it started from was a modern one. The attempt to model society in the sense of overcoming prejudices related to the superiority of a sex was thus contemporary with the evolution of the western world in the 1960s and 1970s.