Back Home from Abroad

In Cairo of course. I recently returned from my trip to Turkey. I participated in a conference in the Aegean coastal city Izmir, the third biggest city in the country and reputably the most Western/supportive of Turkey's staunch secularism. The conference was on Affirmative Action policies for women’s political participation and whether or not such policies are enabling or disabling. Basically, the conference looked at the question of Quotas for female political representatives, or members of parliament. We don’t have such a policy in the United States, but if we did, it would be something like “each state has to elect at least 5 female congresswomen” or something like…to ensure that women made up a certain, substantial percentage of the House of Representatives or the Senate. We don’t do this, and women only make up 13% of our Congressional Representatives. Ouch. That’s less than the global average of 15%, and way less than some of the global leaders in this area. Want to guess the country with the highest percentage of women MPs? Rwanda, coming in with around half of their MPs, shockingly close to the actual percentage of women in the population. The Scandanavian countries do damn well, and Sweeden particularly is a leader in the application of the quota system. But in general, the use of quotas to increase women’s political participation isn’t unique to any part of the world, its pretty spread out around all the continents and regions of the world. In my part of the world, that is in the Arab countries, Tunisia is far and beyond the leader in numbers. 22 percent is their proud statistic. Egypt is pathetic, at 2.4 percent. My favorite is the data for Saudi Arabia, which says 0% for women representatives, but then has an asterix to point out that men don’t have any representatives either, that’s the easy thing about straight up monarchies.


But enough of these numbers, you are probably wondering what it is that I did at this conference. Well, I am proud to say that for the first time, I presented a paper at an academic conference. I wrote my paper on the whole question of quotas in Egypt. I won’t get into all the details (that’s what the conference attendants, not my poor blog readers) but in case it comes up at your next cocktail party, Egypt in fact had a quota reserving 30 seats of the lower house of parliament for women, (that’s 10 percent, folks). But it was pretty badly put into effect, lots of people were unhappy about it, and not just chauvinists. It seemed like the women were unqualified, inexperienced, and were more appointed by Pharaoh Sadat than elected by popular vote. And as you know, Sadat was killed, and Egypt fell into a period of political instability, also not helpful for reforms which Sadat had created. Lots of other details, but in the end, quota was abolished and women now only make up 2 percent.

So what to do. Some would say, “But Pauline, Egypt has so many other problems to worry about, and women’s issues are so marginal.” Easy trap to fall into, but the answer is even easier. Women’s issues are everyone’s issues, that’s the nice thing about making up half the population. Just in the same way that men’s issues are everyone’s responsible, and if men were politically, economically, socially, and religiously marginalized throughout most of history and into current time, I would fully be supporting men’s rights. However, as it is, it is women who make up this marginalized community, but it is all of us who are responsible to correct this imbalance. The biggest problem in Egypt is currently the lack of democracy. And there can be no true democracy without the full participation and representation of women. All parties, across all political lines, should recognize the importance of their female constituency, and should work to empower the women in their own communities. A quota may not be the answer, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

And now I am rambling, but I hope you found this slightly interesting. If so, I have a whole 20 pages and a power point that will certainly make your day.