Gender and Power

Towards Equality and Democratic Governance

Mino Vianello, Mary Hawkesworth, Mino Vianello, Mary Hawkesworth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137514165
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Despite explicit commitments to gender equality, women experience complex modes of disadvantage and discrimination in all nations of the world. Offering sophisticated insights into the persistence of gendered differences in opportunities, roles, power, and rights in societies across the globe, this volume investigates factors that both enable and constrain women's advancement. From intimate relations within families, to social norms, relations, ideologies, and structures of power, to political institutions, electoral systems, and public policies, the chapters analyze possibilities for and obstacles to inclusive democratic practices and identify interventions essential to enable democratic values to take root. Contributors from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the USA provide detailed assessments of the social, economic, and political condition of women, their mobilizations to produce transform gendered power and authority in diverse nations, and their efforts to enhance thequality of their lives, their communities, and democratic governance.

Part I

Democratic Deficits: Sites, Contexts, and Tactics of Redress

Section Introduction

Michal Palgi

Democratization has been celebrated as one of the singular achievements of the late 20th century. In its most rudimentary form, democratization is defined as a transition from various types of authoritarian regime and command economies to liberal democracy and capitalism. In Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Russia, democratization is characterized as a process of transition through which regimes that have been bureaucratic authoritarian, military dictatorships, and/or state socialist move toward an elective system of governance and a capitalist market.

Proponents of democratization suggest that democratic governance respects the dignity of human beings, affords rights and immunities to individuals, prevents abuse of power by government officials (or provides remedies for removal of abusive governments), fosters individual freedom, encourages collective action to achieve political benefits, provides opportunities for political innovation, and maintains mechanisms through which citizens can hold governments accountable. Such optimistic expectations for democratization coexist with marked democratic deficits when the experience of women citizens is taken into consideration. Evidence drawn from women’s lives around the globe suggests that democratization produces gendered redistributions of resources and responsibilities that leave women far removed from the promise of equality. In 2015, the global average for women’s representation in national parliaments was 22.2 percent – a far cry from parity.

The economic indicators of democratization are also troubling. According to the United Nations Development Report (2014, 21), “The 85 richest people in the world have the same wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people. Between 1990 and 2010, income inequality in developing countries rose 11 percent” (21). More than 2.2 billion people, 15 percent of the world population, are either near or living in multidimensional poverty. Nearly 80 percent of the global population lack comprehensive social protection. About 12 percent (842 million) suffer from chronic hunger, and nearly half of all workers – more than 1.5 billion – are in informal or precarious employment (UNDP, 2014, 3). According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), only a third of countries worldwide – with about 28 percent of the global population – provide comprehensive social protection for their citizens (UNDP, 2014, 19). Economic vulnerability is also gendered. Just as women are underrepresented in positions of power, they are overrepresented among the poor.

The chapters in this section explore complex democratic deficits in particular nations in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America, key sites of the “third wave” of democratization since 1990 (Huntington, 1993). The first five chapters provide an overview of women’s participation in the political life of Brazil, Morocco, Japan, Taiwan, Nigeria, and Central-Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Poland. Attuned to the complexity of politics within each nation, the chapters explore factors that facilitate and factors that obstruct women’s inclusion in democratic processes. They also examine women’s political mobilizations to press for political rights, equitable treatment, and greater representation in governance. Individually and collectively, these chapters investigate national traditions and cultures that both enable and constrain women’s advancement. They pay particular attention to political institutions from the role of political parties, the design of election systems and regulations governing campaign finance, to the creation of equality policies and women’s political machinery as forces influencing women’s access to political power. Several chapters explore quite different effects of the introduction of quotas – which have been called women’s “fast track” to political office. With the advent of quotas, the number of women in office has increased, although the increases have been modest. In 2014, women held 9 percent of the seats in parliament in Brazil, 17 percent in Morocco, 24 percent in Poland, and 33 percent in Taiwan. As this variability suggests, quotas may take very different forms (voluntary or mandatory, constitutional or statutory, reserved seats or inclusion on candidates’ lists). The particular form of quota, the will of those in party elites to implement quotas, the penalties established for non-compliance, and the kinds of women recruited through quotas all affect the success of women in securing elective offices, and what they can accomplish once elected.

Gender equality has become a focus of international as well as national politics. With the near unanimous ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the global mobilization to fulfill the 12 equality commitments of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, women have mobilized locally and globally to press for improvements in their lives. Moving from local to global, activists mobilize within nation-states for women’s economic well-being, physical security, and gender justice, pressuring their governments to raise these issues in international meetings. Moving from global to local, they use international treaties to enhance public awareness of gender inequities and to pressure governments to ratify and comply with international covenants such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Once ratified, they monitor their government’s compliance with international agreements and seek creative means to hold them accountable, sometimes taking recourse to international agencies and courts. Within international forums, they participate in multilateral and intergovernmental arenas to lobby directly for women’s issues and for the creation of international women’s machinery to meet women’s needs. They have also injected new issues, such as violence against women, into international politics, and they have worked to transform the terms of political discourse in areas such as population control and human rights. The chapters in this section provide rich accounts of women’s activism to secure social change within their nations, while also documenting the challenges they encounter in doing so.

Political life is only one arena in which women struggle for opportunity, recognition, and positions of power. Business and corporate sectors are also disproportionately male dominant. The final chapter in this section provides an overview of women’s paths to power in the business world and the complex challenges they face as a minority – or indeed as outsiders – in the top echelon. Like women in political offices, top women in business confront organizational cultures in local and international institutions based on men’s knowledge, men’s experiences, and men’s tendency to protect their traditional superior power over women. Exclusionary practices often structure the operations of firms. Women are often asked to assimilate into the existing organizational culture and to accept its value commitments and behaviors. As a result, the advantages of diversity are often lost, and inequalities are reproduced rather than eradicated.

In the business world as in politics, some women overcome gender barriers by using their political skills and will, as well as their social networks. For others, it is more difficult to surmount the challenges and barriers standing in the way of their advancement or to circumvent powerful gatekeepers hostile to women’s presence. These barriers are so deeply embedded in the workplace and political cultures that it will take a strategic, persistent campaign of incremental changes and “small wins” to achieve meaningful progress. Yet, as the “third wave” of democratization since 1990 makes clear, steady progress cannot be taken for granted. Advancement for women in some contexts has generated “backlash,” the resurgence of right-wing or fundamentalist parties committed to the restoration of male advantage.

Bibliography

Huntington, Samuel P. (1993). The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.

United Nations Human Development Report (2014). Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerability and Building Resilience. New York: UNDP.

1

Women’s Political Representation in Brazil

José Álvaro Moisés and Beatriz Rodrigues Sanchez

Introduction

Since the 1990s, the issue of women’s political representation has become one of the most important topics in the discussion of the nature of democratic regimes in different parts of the world. What are the implications for the functioning of democracy when democratic regimes maintain fundamental inequalities among citizens? This question affects not only young democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, but also democracies in countries in which the system of government is perceived to have been consolidated long ago, such as the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Italy.

Women comprise one of the last social constituencies to win political rights in contemporary democracies. And, just as in consolidated democracies, this achievement weighs relatively little on the distribution of positions in political offices in new democracies. In the field of political science, Lijphart (1999, 2003) has touched the heart of the matter by arguing that the rate of women’s participation in national parliaments is a relevant indicator of the quality of democracies currently in existence. Other authors reinforce this argument by insisting on the fundamental centrality of the principle of political equality in the evaluation of the comparative advantages of a democratic regime over its alternatives (Iazzetta and Vargas-Cullell, 2004; Diamond and Morlino, 2005; Moisés, 2015; Chapter 14 of this book). According to Diamond and Morlino, the representation of women in parliament is an indicator of the fair representation required for the making of policy that is inclusive and mindful of all citizens. That means that the more equitable the representation of women in a country, the better the quality of its democracy. Equality, in this case, does not only involve the right to elect the members of the political elite who will govern, but also the right to be chosen to take part in and to influence the decision-making processes that affect the political community as a whole.

Based on this premise, this chapter aims to contribute to the debate over women’s political participation by discussing the case of Brazil from a comparative perspective. This subject becomes even more important at a moment when the country has completed a quarter of a century of democracy following the overthrow of military dictatorship in 1985 – only the second democratic period since Brazil became a republic in 1889. Currently, the participation of women in Brazilian parliament is less than half of the world average; that is, less than 9 percent compared to 22.2 percent. Among all Latin American countries, Brazil ranks second to last – Panama ranks last – in the participation of women in parliament.

On one hand, dominant culture, social behaviors, and traditional divisions of roles among genders involve discrimination against and unequal treatment of women. On the other hand, institutional structure of Brazilian democracy does not maintain any formal restrictions on their political participation. Recent research has shown that, regardless of the existence of a policy of quotas for women in political competition – designed to correct the traditional exclusion of women from political participation – the effective differences in the treatment of men and women by political parties continue to affect the access of women to financing opportunities for running for office, thus negatively impacting their electoral performance (Grossi and Miguel, 2001; Miguel and Biroli, 2009; Meneguello et al., 2012; Speck and Sacchet, 2012). The relevant issue consists, then, of knowing if the implications of that impact are limited to the political exclusion of women from politics or if they affect the functioning of the democratic regime as a whole.

On the international scene, an increasing preoccupation with this theme has recently translated into the creation of commissions, within organizations and international regimes, designed to address issues related to the participation of women in the politically relevant decision-making mechanisms and to gender politics in general. An example of this type of initiative was the creation in 2010 of a UN women’s agency: the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, headed until recently by Michelle Bachelet, president of Chile. At the same time, in the 1990s, the role of political institutions in the promotion and implementation of equal rights for women and men achieved new relevance with research into, among other approaches, historical institutionalism, which became one of the decisive explanations for political discrimination against women. Owing to their power to recruit people into political life, to legitimate political leaders, and to decide on issues of public interest, political parties became a central factor in the debate. With regard to parliaments, they are perceived in the literature as fundamental pieces in the articulation of the political interests of women. This finding served as inspiration for movements promoting political reforms as a means of bettering the democratic regime (Goetz and Sacchet, 2008).

The contemporary political debate about the political participation of women emphasizes, among many other things, two principal arguments. The first raises the question of justice or of recognition; drawing on the premise that it is illogical and unnatural for a democratic political system to sustain the notion that the talent and virtues necessary for public life are attributed exclusively to the masculine gender. Part of the literature demonstrates a conflict that exists between the defense of political rights for women and the effective functioning of institutions created by men who constitute the dominant elite: in practice, institutions constrain the performance of women and other outsiders to the system. According to this perspective, institutions are not neutral. Rather, they nurture biases or incentives that make certain outcomes more likely than others. Furthermore, they are marked by the circumstances of their historical development, reflecting the power relations at their root. Given that representative institutions were created in the context of asymmetric gender relations, important implications arise for the substantive representation of women. Moreover, the effects of that asymmetry resulted in the primacy of masculine conceptions, interests, and priorities (Franceschet, 2011). In other words, the absence of women from positions of political representation or implementation of public policies should be attributed to the discrimination they encounter, even if the discrimination is not institutionalized. The second argument refers to the threat of compromising the efficacy of institutions such as parliaments and parties as a result of the exclusion of women, who, in the majority of cases, make up 50 percent or more of the population of the countries under consideration here. In this sense, the exclusion of women would affect not only the performance of those institutions but also the very legitimacy of the representative political system. This brings into question the nature of the democratic regime.

Other authors maintain that ensuring the presence of women in parliaments or other offices as public representatives, from a symbolic point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword: Gender, Power, and the Worldwide Struggle for Equality
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Democratic Deficits: Sites, Contexts, and Tactics of Redress
• Part II: Explaining Inequalities: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
• Part III: Reconceptualizing the Quality of Democracy
• Part IV: Strategies for Social and Political Transformation
• Conclusion
• Name Index
• Subject Index