Negligent democracy

nasreenamina

Butterflies in the Storm

• Comments (1)
• Share this story
• View profile

Tags:

• democracy
• women and politics
• women and power

No Women, No Democracy

It seems to me even when women are every day trying hard to be visible in our demands and standing up for our rights, this is not a priority to tell about for some governments.The landscape for the participation of women in power position in Latinamerica is very dissapointed, agree with the study "State of information systems, statistics latinamerican electoral bodies from a gender inperspective", prepared by UN Women.

The document aims to understand and evaluate from a gender perspective the state of statistical information systems (IS) of the electoral bodies in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Costa Rica , Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Paraguay and Mexico. According to the report, the majority of electoral bodies have stated that in general dont have information disaggregated by sex or ethnic group because there is no law that FORCES them to announce it !!!!!

Another phenomenon was reported at the regional level, except in Colombia, is that often there are many women candidates who fail to become mayors, cause they are in the last positions in the listings.

The production and recording of information about women's political participation at local level, is considerably smaller than seen nationally. All have information on the percentage of women mayors, but not the number of councilors women and men .The regional situation regarding women's participation has been classified as disappointing, since the study reveals a picture of inequality more pronounced than in national environment; for example,in Panama and Guatemala more than 90 percent of the departments are occupied by men .

The UN Women paper stresses there is a very low presence of women holding executive positions at the provincial, state or regional, which becomes another of the outstanding accounts. Finally, the study recommends that countries strengthen institutional mechanisms so that statistics departments work together with the electoral bodies and motivating the committees of women to produce and disseminate this information.

In Guatemala in the elections held on September 11, according to preliminary data, from 19158 seats will be occupied by women, four of them indigenous and in the case of the 333 municipalities, seven are women, noone of them indigenous.

Democracy is not only about to have laws that allow women voting, be candidat, speak and organize meeting.Is necessary for the results of the struggles that have taken place about equal participation, be recorded, made ​​visible, reproduced and studied to be useful for future strategies in the field of women's political participation.