Parliaments & Representatives

The UCLG Standing Committee on Gender Equality monitors and promotes the participation of women at local level across the world. The Committee firmly believes that the participation of women in local decision-making is the foundation of global development. The Standing Committee works with local elected women and grassroots organizations to build their capacities and increase women’s representation.

Local and regional governments have a long track record of working internationally for gender equality, with a particular focus on increasing the representation of local elected women and the promoting the participation of all women in local decision-making:  

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Click here to read the UCLG Standing Committee on Gender Equality's report on the role of local governments in advancing and promoting gender equality for sustainability.

The aim of the project was to examine the advisability of creating a new mechanism to address laws that discriminate against women. The terms of reference specified two key objectives. The first was to overview existing UN mechanisms to ascertain the extent to which they addressed the issue of discriminatory laws. This involved interviewing UN human rights and agency officials working in both Geneva and New York1 and also reviewing the reports and jurisprudence of human rights committees and special procedure mechanisms. The second was to try to get national data on laws that discriminate against women. This was to be done by means of a questionnaire. On the basis of the data gathered, the consultant was required to advise on whether a special mechanism addressing discriminatory laws was needed (...)

Co-organized by the Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU) and the National Assembly of Zambia, and building on the theme “Agenda 2030: Youth leading the way, leaving no one behind”, the third edition of the IPU’s Global Conference of Young Parliamentarians was held on 16 and 17 March 2016 in Lusaka, Zambia, with the attendance of 130 young men and women parliamentarians from 50 countries. Click here to access the outcome document of the conference. 

The Inter-parliamentary Union has recently published a report reviewing the developments made in women's participation in parliaments in the last 20 years, globally, regionally and at the country level. The report shows that the past 20 years have witnessed an impressive rise in the share of women in national parliaments around the world, with the global average nearly doubling during that time – and all regions making substantial progress towards the goal of 30 per cent women in decision-making. The global average of women in national parliaments has increased from 11.3 per cent in 1995 to 22.1 per cent in 2015 (+10.8 points). All regions registered some increase in their share of women in parliament, the greatest strides being made in the Americas. The countries that achieved the greatest progress between 1995 and 2015 in their single or lower houses are Rwanda (+59.5 points, achieving 63.8% by 2015), Andorra (+46.4 points with 50% in 2015), and Bolivia (+42.3 points with 53.1% in 2015). 

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The number of women Speakers of Parliament reached an all-time high by the end of 2015 at 49 (or 17.9% of the total number of Speakers), reports the Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU) in “Women in Parliaments in 2015: The year in review”. That is up from 43 at the beginning of the year. Elections in Argentina, Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, Lesotho, San Marino, Switzerland and Trinidad and Tobago resulted in the appointment of women Speakers. Women also became Speakers for the first time ever in Namibia, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates. Despite the significant increase in the number of women Speakers of Parliament, the number of women parliamentarians globally rose by a mere 0.5% from 2014. Bigger improvements were seen in the Americas (+0.8%), sub-Saharan Africa (+0.7%) and Europe (+0.4%); but those were tempered by timid increases in the Arab States (+0.3%), Asia (+0.1%) and the Pacific (+0.1%). The Americas remain in the lead in terms of regional averages, with women’s parliamentary representation standing at 27.2%. There was a slight decrease in the Nordic countries (-0.4%), which have now stagnated at 41.5%. It was also reported that in elections where quotas were legislated in 2015, women took almost a quarter of the parliamentary seats available. More women appear to have won seats where political parties adopted voluntary quotas. Only 13.6% of seats were won by women in countries without quotas. Click here to see the report. 

Gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting are fixtures of the debates and documents of the international women’s movement. Politically active women all over the world have developed gender mainstreaming as a strategy to enable them to emerge from their powerlessness, both real and perceived, in relation to political actors. The purpose of these new strategies is to eliminate injustices in gender relations and to get rid of all forms of discrimination based on gender.

Gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting are strategies to be implemented by organisations and institutions, such as administrations. They lead to changes in decision-making processes in these organisations. The strategies are therefore not confined to special projects for women but rather to an organisation’s everyday operations. Such operations are scrutinised in terms of gender equality. This involves systematic procedures inside organisations ordered by management and implemented by all employees. The analysis of all operational domains and measures, all products and every part of an organisation forms the core of gender mainstreaming. Implicit in the concept of gender is that gender relations are culturally and socially determined and constantly reproduced. The question of how social structures contribute to the incessant reproduction of certain assignments and life situations for men and women is decisive. Gender analyses concern the production and specific characteristics of life and work situations in which men and women differ. A gender analysis, therefore, not only enquires about the differences between men and women in a particular group, but also about how these differences are produced and what contribution is made by the measures one is investigating. Gender budgeting is the application of the principle of gender mainstreaming to financial and budget policy: in other words, to public revenues and expenditures. The European Council defines gender budgeting as follows: Gender budgeting is the application of gender mainstreaming in the budgetary process. Gender budgeting means a gender-based assessment of budgets and incorporates a gender perspective at all levels of the budgetary process and restructuring revenues and expenditures in order to promote gender equality. Gender budgeting does not mean reserving a specific budget for women or for men, but investigating the effects of all budget decisions on gender relations and gearing those decisions to the aims of gender policy.