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Education

Mark P. Jones, in reference to Norris's Legislative Recruitment, stats that: “Unlike other factors that have been identified as influencing the level of women’s legislative representation such as a country’s political culture and level of economic development, institutional rules are relatively easy to change” . He describes the idea that institutions are capable of changing rules very quickly where looking at something from a larger perspective (such as an entire political system or even the cultural background of that system) takes longer to process, Jones believes this is how institutions are the basis of the issues at hand. Education is a vital tool for any person in society to better themselves in their career path. Regarding the current status of women, culture aspects are breaking down and are deviating from the social norm in western cultures. "The biggest hurdles to overcome for women are still on the local level where both men and women are often recruited from the communities and have limited political skills". The level of education in these local governments or, for that matter, the people in those positions of power are said to not be at a level of sufficient standards.

An example of how education is seen as an issue comes from Beijing. “Most women who attended the NGO Forums accompanying the UN conferences, which are for government delegations though increasingly many governments include activists and NGO members among their official delegates, were middle-class educated women from INGOS, donors, academics, and activists”. Amanda Gouws references Morna Lowe in discussing a specific woman MP (Member in Parliament). Lydia Kompe, a well-known South African activist, was one of these rural women. She argued that she felt overwhelmed and completely disempowered. In the beginning, she did not think she could finish her term of office. She viewed her lack of education as her biggest drawback. Some argue that Lydia’s reasoning for not having a formal support system in helping her with her position is that her current place was not of interest or of an importance to the rest of the world. Manisha Desai explains that: There is an inequality simply around the fact that the UN system and its locations say a lot about the current focus of those systems, such positions being in the US and Western Europe allow easier access to those women in the area. “It is also important to note that institutions affect the cultural propensity to elect women candidates in different ways in different parts of the world”

The history regarding women representation has been a major contribution in establishing the current status as to how society should go about viewing such concepts. Ph.D. Andrew Reynolds states: “historical experience often leads to gender advancement, and political liberalization enables women to mobilize within the public sphere”. He argues that we will see a larger number of women in higher office positions in established democracy than in democracies that are developing, and “the more illiberal a state is, the fewer women will be in positions of power”. This pertains to educational systems and established legislation relating to the development and control more women could have in countries already developed. As more countries develop their education systems, it is possible to see a shift in political views regarding women in government. What is even more prevalent within women and government is the tendency of those women to focus on laws regarding women’s rights and standings.

Quotas

“Gender quotas for the election of legislators have been used since the late 1970s by a few political parties (via the party charter) in a small number of advanced industrial democracies; such examples would be like Germany and Norway”. Quota systems have been examined through a large number of country statistics regarding women in office. Andrew Reynolds says there is “an increasing practice in legislatures for the state, or the parties themselves, to utilize formal or informal quota mechanisms to promote women as candidates and MPs”. Quotas have been established in many countries however, there is still a limited ratio of women representation that takes place within these quotas. “Although over 60% of countries have reached at least 10% women in their national legislature, fewer have crossed the 20% and 30% barriers. By February 2006, only about 10% of sovereign nations had more than 30% women in parliament” . Though the global rise of women in office helps contribute to equality laws pertaining to women, many cultural and social concepts regarding women are slowly adjusting to the shift of women representation. This makes it hard for women to be acknowledged in politics as much as countries say they should be. Paxton explains this best by saying “Although women's formal political representation is now taken for granted, the struggle for descriptive representation remains. Indeed, gender inequality across all elected and appointed positions persists .

Paxton describes three factors that are the basis for why national level representation has become much larger over the past decades. There is structural, which is the idea that educational advancements along with an increase in women’s participation in the labor force plays a role in developing representation. Then there is political; in this idea, representation of women in office is based on a proportionality system, this is the idea that if a political party gets 25% of the votes, they gain 25% of the seats. In this process, the party feels obligated to balance the representation within their votes between genders, increasing women’s activity in political standing. A plurality-majority system, such as the one the United States has, only allows single candidate elections. Last, there is Ideology; the concept that the cultural aspects of women such as their roles or positions in certain countries dictate where they stand in that society, either helping or handicapping those women from entering political positions. There have been numerous arguments saying the plurality-majority system is a disadvantage to the chance that women get into office. Andrew Reynolds brings forth one of these arguments by stating: “Plurality-majority single-member-district systems, whether of the Anglo-American first-past-the-post (FPTP) variety, the Australian preference ballot alternative vote (AV), or the French two-round system (TRS), are deemed to be particularly unfavorable to women's chances of being elected to office”. Andrew believes that the best systems are list-proportional systems. “In these systems of high proportionality between seats won and votes cast, small parties are able to gain representation and parties have an incentive to broaden their overall electoral appeal by making their candidate lists as diverse as possible”.

With quotas drastically changing the number of female representatives in political power, a bigger picture unravels. Though countries are entitled to regulate their own laws, the quota system helps explain social and cultural institutions and their understandings and overall view of women in general. “At first glance, these shifts seem to coincide with the adoption of candidate gender quotas around the globe as quotas have appeared in countries in all major world regions with a broad range of institutional, social, economic and cultural characteristics”.

Quotas have been quite useful in allowing women to gain support and opportunities when attempting to achieve seats of power, but some see this as a wrong doing. Drude Dahlerup and Lenita Freidenvall argue this in their article; Quotas as a ‘Fast Track’ to Equal Representation for Women by stating: “From a liberal perspective, quotas as a specific group right conflict with the principle of equal opportunity for all. Explicitly favoring certain groups of citizens, i.e. women, means that not all citizens (men) are given an equal chance to attain a political career”. Dahlerup and Freidenvall break down the concept that even though it is not an equal opportunity for men and it necessarily breaks the concept of “classical liberal notion of equality” it is almost required to bring the relation of women in politics to a higher state, whether that is within equal opportunity or just equal results. “According to this understanding of women’s under-representation, mandated quotas for the recruitment and election of female candidates, possibly also including time-limit provisions, are needed”.

Legislation

There have been numerous occasions where equal legislation has, in itself and through the effects that women have, benefited the overall progression of women equality on a global scale. Though women have entered legislation, the overall representation within higher ranks of government is not being established. “Looking at ministerial positions broken down by portfolio allocation, one sees a worldwide tendency to place women in the softer sociocultural ministerial positions rather than in the harder and politically more prestigious positions of economic planning, national security, and foreign affairs, which are often seen as stepping-stones to national leader ship”.

Current Research Agendas

Though the representation has become a much larger picture, it is important to notice the inclination of political activity emphasizing women over the years in different countries. ”Although women's representation in Latin America, Africa, and the West progressed slowly until 1995, in the most recent decade, these regions show substantial growth, doubling their previous percentage” .

Researching politics on a global scale does not just reinvent ideas of politics, especially towards women, but brings about numerous concepts. Sheri Kunovich and Pamela Paxton research method, for example, took a different path by studying “cross-national” implications to politics, taking numerous countries into consideration. This approach helps identify research beforehand that could be helpful in figuring out commodities within countries and bringing about those important factors when considering the overall representation of women. “At the same time, we include information about the inclusion of women in the political parties of each country” . Research within gender and politics has taken a major step towards a better understanding of what needs to be better studied. Dr. Mona L. Krook states: These kinds of studies help establish that generalizing countries together is far too limiting to the overall case that we see across countries and that we can take the information we gain from these studies that look at countries separately and pose new theories as to why countries have the concepts they do; this helps open new reasons and thus confirms that studies need to be performed over a much larger group of factors. Authors and researchers such as Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon also state that single comparisons of established and developed countries is simply not enough but is also surprisingly hurtful to the progress of this research, they argue that focusing on a specific country “tends to duplicate rather than interrogate” the overall accusations and concepts we understand when comparing political fields . They continue by explaining that comparative politics has not established sex equality as a major topic of discussion among countries. This research challenges the current standings as to what needs to be the major focus in order to understand gender in politics.

Grassroots Women's Empowerment Movements

Though women’s movements have a very successful outcome with the emphasis on gaining equality towards women, other movements are taking different approaches to the issue. Women in certain countries, instead of approaching the demands as representation of women as “a particular interest group”, have approached the issue on the basis of the “universality of sex differences and the relation to the nation” . Htun and Weldon also bring up the point of democracy and its effects on the level of equality it brings. In their article, they explain that a democratic country is more likely to listen to “autonomous organizing” within the government. Women’s movements would benefit from this the most or has had great influence and impact because of democracy, though it can become a very complex system. When it comes to local government issues, political standings for women are not necessarily looked upon as a major issue. “Even civil society organizations left women’s issues off the agenda. At this level, traditional leaders also have a vested interest that generally opposes women’s interests”. Theorists believe that having a setback in government policies would be seen as catastrophic to the overall progress of women in government. Amanda Gouws says that “The instability of democratic or nominally democratic regimes makes women’s political gains very vulnerable because these gains can be easily rolled back when regimes change. The failure to make the private sphere part of political contestation diminishes the power of formal democratic rights and limits solutions to gender inequality”.