Women's political participation

Female legislative candidates grouped under the Women’s Coalition staged a rally on Saturday to protest rampant vote-buying during the recent legislative election, which they say caused many female candidates to lose.

“Our hard work was for nothing because we didn’t have money to buy votes,” said Meylina Wonatorey, a candidate from Golkar Party for the Papua Council, said in the rally in front of Aston Hotel, Jayapura, where the provincial elections commission was counting the vote.

IPU has kick-started its priority support to Egypt in its efforts to establish democracy by providing advice and expertise on the drafting on a new electoral law. The law would have to be in place before parliamentary elections can take place, the last step in a series of planned political processes on Egypt’s roadmap to democracy.

Chief Minister Katy Gallagher says Australia has gone backwards on female participation at the highest levels of politics and decried the perception that leadership is a man’s game.

Addressing the annual YWCA breakfast on Tuesday, Ms Gallagher said the lack of senior women in politics around the country was unsatisfactory and that a period in 2011 when Australia had four female leaders now felt “like an interruption to the normal programming”.

As it stands today, Tuesday 29th April 2014, 187 Labour Party candidates have been selected to run in the Local Elections in May 2014. Currently 55 of these candidates are women which is just under thirty percent (29.4%). Seventeen of the fifty-five female candidates, (31%) are first time candidates. 

Labour Women will be rolling out a range of supports for all our local election candidates including mentoring, training, (wo)man power for help with canvassing and drops and financial support in 2014.

Its official. A total of 33,46,639 people from the district are eligible to exercise their franchise in the forthcoming general elections to be held on May 7. While women voters lead the pack with 16,75,688 voters, there are 16,70,710 male voters and 241 in the others category.

Though the total number of voters as on January 1, 2014 was 32,19,406, the rising awareness about the importance of the right to vote led to the total number of voters increasing to 33,46,639 in the last four months.

Women in Tamil Nadu not only outnumbered men on the voter list, they beat them in the race for getting the indelible mark on April 24. While 73.51 per cent of men (2,02,27,493) exercised their franchise for the Lok Sabha elections, the number of women who cast their votes stood at 73.86 per cent (2,03,27,045).

Of the total number of voters (5,50,42,876), except the Service Voters, 4,05,54,957 cast their votes in this election. With this, the final poll percentage stood at 73.68.

Women’s issues may be high on the agenda for political parties vying for votes in India’s mammoth general election, but few female lawmakers will get an opportunity to implement the policies being proposed.

Less than a fifth of the candidates standing for the front-running main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or the ruling Congress, are women, according to an analysis.

In the current parliament, women hold only 11% of seats in both houses, less than Pakistan at 21% and Afghanistan at 28%, research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union group shows.