There is great misunderstanding of what we mean when we speak about the women in decision making positions. Additionaly, the data on this issue are mostly missing.

It seems that the approach to this issue was vague and followed the easier path - collection of the data that are easier to get. For example finding out the numbers of national legislators, members of the government at national level, judges, journalists, and managers.

If we want to really know about the women in decision making positions we have to ask ourselves the following questions:
-What are the positions that have the biggest impact on political, economic, social, cultural development in any society?

Some of the positions can be categorized as following:

In the civil society:
- Owners (with more than 10% share) of the companies and media on national and international levels.
- Presidents and members of the executive boards of the state owned and private international corporations and national companies.
- Presidents and members of the boards of the state owned funds (pensions, health care).
- Presidents of the parliamentary parties and members of their executive boards on national level and on the level of regions and big cities.
- Presidents of the Trade Unions and members of their executive boards.
- Editors of the public owned media and private owned media.
- Journalists - columnists rectors, deans, full time professors.
- Directors of the research institutions and research projects' managers or coordinators.
- President and members of the national Academy of science.
- Heads of the prevalent national churches and the highest representatives of these churches at the national and international level.
- President of the state

At the legislative power level:
- Local councilors (at least the ones of the cities with more than 10.000 inhabitants)
- Regional councilors
- Members of Parliament
- Members of the European Parliament (in EU)

At the executive power level
- Prime minister or president of the state Cabinet ministers
- Deputy ministers or state secretaries Ambassadors, deputy ambassadors and consuls
- Mayors of the cities with more than 10.000 inhabitants State prosecutor
- Members of the institutionalized bodies for social dialogue

At the judicial level:
- President and members of the Constitutional Court and Judges of the higher courts
- Ombudsman

There is no single definition of women in political decision making to include all of these categories. There is no data segregated by these categories, which blurrs the picture.

This means that we need to set up a consolidated definition and a special database that has information on the share of women in parliaments, political parties, and representatives of Trade Unions.

Kind regards,

Sonja Lokar

CEE Network for Gender Issues

Lena Wängnerud
Associate professor,Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, SWEDEN

The question has been raised on how to define women in decision-making position. I believe that it is useful to distinguish between studies focusing on positions, from studies focusing on the content of politics. What positions that is most effective for women, in order to influence decision-making, varies across countries and across time.

In research on women in parliaments there is a much used distinction between descriptive and substantive representation. Roughly this distinction corresponds with whether the number of women elected is in focus, or if focus is directed towards effects of women being present in parliament. In 1995 the influential book The Politics of Presence, by Anne Phillips, was published. The theory on the politics of presence suggests that female politicians are best equipped to represent the interests of women. The argument builds upon differences between women and men in their everyday life, e.g. differences relating to child-rearing, education and occupations, divisions of paid and unpaid labor, exposure to violence and sexual harassment.

In order to empirically test the assertion that female politicians, to a greater extent than male politicians, represent the interests of women the concept of women’s interests have to be defined. In a study on the Swedish parliament I divided, on a theoretically level, the concept into three components: the recognition of women as a social category; the acknowledgement of the unequal balance of power between the sexes; and the occurrence of policies to increase the autonomy of female citizens (Wängnerud 2000, 2005). On the empirical level this corresponded to measurements indicating female versus male MPs attitudes and behaviour on areas such as gender equality and social welfare policy. The data I used was parliamentary survey studies conducted in The Swedish Parliament 1985, 1994 and 2002. The analysis controls for effects of the politicians gender also when other factors e.g. party affiliation, age, education and parliamentary experience are taken into account.

The results that emerge will not take anyone, who has followed the feminist field of research, by surprise. They show, for example, that issues of social welfare policy are weighted more heavily on the agendas of female politicians than those of male politicians. We see as well that it is almost exclusively female politicians who pursue issues of equality between the sexes. What the empirical study contributes, however, is a significant measure of stability to the feminist critique on more established theories of representative democracy. The conclusion is that women’s increased participation in Swedish parliament has meant that a shift of emphasis has occurred on the political agenda: women’s interests have been given greater scope and become more central.

I believe that it is almost impossible to go from a low proportion of female parliamentarians to a high proportion without going through a stage wherein patterns of “masculine” and “feminine” appear with respect to the content of politics. It is likely that the Swedish example show that what we have at hand is a development that can be described in terms of different phases. The fact that women have historically contributed to putting greater emphasis on the social welfare aspects of politics does not necessarily mean that they should confine themselves to this area for all time. What is also displayed in the Swedish case is a current tendency towards a convergence between the sexes.

References:
Wängnerud, Lena: A Step-Wise Development: Women in Parliament in Sweden (2005) in Ballington, Julie and Karam, Azza red. Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers. IDEA Handbook revised version. Stockholm: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

Wängnerud, Lena: Testing the Politics of Presence. Women’s Representation in the Swedish Riksdag (2000) in Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol 23. No. 1, 67-91.