Women achieving more politically

By ROBIN HINDERY, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jun 20, 3:39 AM ET

NEW YORK - For all the talk about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Condoleezza Rice battling for the presidency in 2008, the closest a woman has come to the Oval Office is actress Geena Davis, star of the recently canceled TV series "Commander in Chief."

Yet, in other nations, a female leader isn't just the stuff of television drama.

Countries as diverse as Britain, Chile, Liberia and Israel have elected women to their highest political office. When it comes to female representation in national parliaments, the U.S. ranks 68th in the world.

A primary reason for the success of women in politics elsewhere, according to one observer, is the effort on the part of women themselves.

"Women in other countries have made more strong-willed efforts than we have," said Marie Wilson, head of the New York-based White House Project, a nonpartisan group that works to increase women's participation in politics. "They have gelled with each other to say: 'We know women matter in these positions. We must have more women.'"

No woman has ever led the presidential ticket of a major political party in the United States. Only one — Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 — has been nominated for vice president by either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Clinton, a senator from New York and a former first lady, is considered by many a front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Rice, President Bush's secretary of state, is mentioned as a possible Republican candidate even though she adamantly denies any interest in national office.

In Washington today, 85 percent of Congress is male. As of mid-May, six months before the November elections, 175 women were considered candidates for the House and 18 for the Senate. In 1992, a record 222 women filed for House seats and 29 for the Senate.

While female representation in Congress has hovered between 13 percent and 15 percent for the past five years, the presence of women has increased significantly in parliaments in many other countries.

Even the new democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan have a greater percentage of female representatives than does Congress, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international group based in Geneva, Switzerland. The organization ranked 188 countries according to their female representatives.

In 2005, the global average for female representation at the parliamentary level was 16.3 percent, an average that increased from the year before largely due to quotas put in place in several Latin American countries to promote the candidacies of women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

Such gains for women were not limited to the developing world. Quotas implemented in 2005 within Britain's Labour Party led to the highest number of women ever being elected in that country — 128.

The U.S. has "gotten further and further behind as other countries have adopted quotas and other mechanisms to ensure they are using all their resources, meaning their women," Wilson said. "Those countries implemented quotas because they finally decided that political parity was important enough to be given some teeth."

The Inter-Parliamentary Union found that the average ratio of female parliamentarians in countries that used quotas in 2005 elections was nearly twice that those without such special measures: 26.9 percent versus 13.6 percent.

In 2003, the number of women in Rwanda's National Assembly doubled, largely due to the creation of a constitutionally mandated quota. Since that year, Rwanda has been No. 1 in the global ranking of women in national parliaments, with 48.8 percent of its assembly made up of women.

Experts say the success of quotas does not tell the whole story. Other factors helping female politicians outside the U.S. include financial support, women-focused reforms within individual political parties, and an organized effort by the media and the general public to champion political parity.

"The absolute most fundamental part of a successful policy for gender equality is to give opportunities for women to get economic independence," said Martin Nilsson, a Social Democrat in Sweden's parliament and his party's spokesman on gender equality.

"Major ingredients ... are the creation of a well-funded service sector; individual, and not family based, taxation and social benefits; and finally, and most important, a family policy giving women a real opportunity to combine work and family."

Sweden ranks second in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's ranking.

Another common denominator among some of the governments with the highest rates of female participation was a shift in the political balance of power following a period of violent conflict, said Anders Johnsson, the secretary general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

"Some of the success stories we've seen are stories where women had to assume roles during conflict that were traditionally dominated by men," Johnsson said, singling out Rwanda, Mozambique and Burundi.

"When the conflict was over, the women were not willing to give up the power that they had attained, and they promoted systems that then allowed them to be elected into office," he said.

Experts point to a number of problems the U.S. needs to solve to bring more women into office: the cost of running a competitive campaign, redistricting that favors incumbents — most of them male — and stagnant numbers at the state legislature level.

Quotas appear an unlikely option for increasing female representation in American government.

"Some people have discussed it in the U.S.," said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, "but people in this country tend to run when you say 'quota.'"

****(Angela Merker Chanceller of German and USA Condolezza Rice, Secretary of State)

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