6 | - Número: 010 | 30 de Novembro de 2012

8. Measures accompanying the monolith

The Inter-parliamentary Union has recently published a study on gender-sensitive parliaments, which includes a review of good practices from all over the world.

In the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a report is currently being prepared on best practices for promoting gender equality in political parties. This report will be debated during the October partsession. Amongst the main recommendations made to political parties are:
introducing a formal commitment to gender equality and gender mainstreaming in their statute; organising campaigns and activities to attract women’s membership; setting up women-only structures and allocating them with adequate funding; ensuring that the bodies which select candidates to stand for election are representative of society (and therefore include a proportional presence of women); ensuring maximum transparency in the procedure for the selection of candidates to stand for election; introducing a minimum quota of 40 per cent of the under-represented gender in the executive boards at all level; in the case of proportional electoral systems, introducing a minimum quota of 40 per cent of the underrepresented sex in the electoral lists, accompanied by special gender safeguards as regards the ranking order and the positions at the top of the list (preferably through a zipper-system); in the case of majoritarian electoral systems, encouraging the shortlisting of candidates of the underrepresented gender, if appropriate through ‘all-women shortlists’ or priority lists with an equal number of people of either sex; setting up mentoring and training programmes to enhance the capacity of talented women to take up positions of political responsibility; setting up training programmes to strengthen women’s media skills and ensure that women members are given a fair chance to speak on behalf of the party on a broad range of issues, including ‘hard policy issues’ such as foreign policy, economics, budget, and so on; ensuring that, during electoral campaigns, the broadcasting time allocated to the party is proportionally shared by men and women candidates; setting up measures to enable women reconcile political engagement and family commitments, for instance by providing free child care during important party events or during electoral campaigns and avoiding in so far as possible that party meetings take place at unsociable hours; setting up systems to regularly assess and discuss gender distribution in political party structures and party mandates, for instance by foreseeing that the party leader reports on this matter on an annual basis.

9. Was it only a movie?

The Zapatero government in Spain introduced policies to promote women’s employment, to reduce the salary gap, to tackle violence against women, to promote their presence at the top of company boards. Above all, it led by example: perfect equality between women and men in the cabinet; women in positions which were previously considered as men’s stronghold. The photo of Carme Chacon, the Minister of Defence, 7 months pregnant, reviewing an honour guard upon taking office was on the front page of many newspapers and magazines.
In 2012, Zapatero’s achievements look like a film.
What has changed? Perhaps the explanation lies in the different sensitivity of political parties, in particular a more traditional view of gender roles, also in politics. Perhaps there are also other reasons: for instance, there is a risk that gender equality policies face a setback due to the economic crisis:

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