NEWS

28 February 2006

MORE WOMEN IN POLITICS: GLOBAL STUDY

Women made up 16.3 per cent of the membership of parliaments worldwide at the end of 2005, edging up from 15.7 per cent a year earlier, the Inter-Parliamentary Union has reported.

The latest statistics confirmed that women have made steady progress in elections since a landmark world conference on women in Beijing in 1995, when females made up just 11.3 per cent of the world's MPs, the group said in its annual survey.

Women on average comprised 20 percent of the deputies elected in the 39 countries which held parliamentary elections last year, IPU officials said at UN headquarters. In nine countries, more than 30 per cent of those elected or returned to office in 2005 were women, with Norway topping the list at 37.9 per cent, the group said.

Women fared the best in Nordic countries and the worst in Arab states, the group found in its latest annual round up. The US, which had no elections last year, ranked 69, with 66 women in the US House of Representatives (or 15.2 per cent) and fourteen female senators, or 14 per cent. The proportion of women legislators fell in eight countries last year, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Dominica, Egypt, Germany, Kyrgyzstan and St. Vincent and Grenadines, the group said.

In two countries – Kyrgyzstan and Micronesia – elections were held in 2005 but no women won seats. In Saudi Arabia, whose parliament was appointed, no women were named because women there did not have the right to vote or run for election, the group said. That brought to nine the total number of countries without a single female MP as of the end of last year, the survey found: Nauru, Palau, Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and the United Arab Emirates as well as Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia and Saudi Arabia.

Source: The Times of Central Asia