... and what about the women?

Today is the famous international women's day. It's celebrated every year with strong demonstrations of female proud worldwide. It’s totally fair, considering that women's world nowadays is not like before, maybe 50, 100 years ago.

It's really common debating some data about women's condition in 8th March. In my opinion, although it's important to share positions about violence, equal labour opportunities and women's leadership, maybe I prefer showing here in the blog how's their participation in politics like. 

Everyone thinks that the right to vote is the way to give voice to social demands, to choose who we would like to decide important things and who we would like to represent us. Obviously the universal suffrage is really important and represents a great conquest in 20th century. However, the right to vote is not enough. 

Although national frameworks for gender equality might exist, political parties have not incorporated these into their intra-party processes and systems. It's rare not to find laws which bring it into countries' legislations. Political parties are very good at making statements about gender equality – but they are sadly lacking in the identification, selection and nomination of female candidates for leadership positions. All internal party cultures too often reflect unwritten rules on male privilege and the use of power as a tool for domination by one gender.

In essence, political parties are failing the electorates of their countries.

In Latin America, since some years ago we can see changes in the political leadership. Women are reaching high political positions, such as president, prime minister, important public offices in general. On the other hand, in other continents this is not so common as it should be, like Europe. There's a really interesting article about this here (version in spanish), and another here (version in french, although it's about the presidential propositions in France).

In countries like Arabic ones the challenge is bigger than in other sides of the world. Women have suffered disproportionately from an autocratic culture at all levels of society. At the same time, the region has several bright spots in terms of women’s participation: in Libya the newly adopted electoral law guarantees women at least 40 out of 200 seats in the constituent assembly that will draft the new constitution for the country. And in Tunisia, women won 27% of seats in the 2011 elections as a result of party quotas – although far from perfect, this was far above the regional average. We could celebrate these numbers regarding new democracies with problematic democratic transitions.

Anyway. in my opinion, there's no machism in having a day dedicated for women. We still have many challenges and a long way to ride... mainly in politics.