One of the English language papers recently had a really frustrating article in it. The headline was “President proposes 15% of seats in parliament be given to women.” Unfortunately, the article only gives 2 or 3 sentences about that headline, the rest of the article is about how the opposition refused to talk with the president. I had heard some rumblings about setting a quota for women in parliament before, but I had never heard the president backing it before.
Women in politics here is a rather strange subject. Women can vote and hold any office. As a matter of fact, there were several woman candidates for president during the last election. They hardly got any votes, but still, they ran. Their election posters were hilarious, there they were (I assume) in full nikab, it could have been any woman under there… I don’t think that there are any women in parliament currently, plenty have run for it though. Yemen’s history has a couple of queens (the Queen of Sheba being the most famous) and Pakistan has elected a female president in the not so distant past, so a female political leader isn’t unheard of here…
I am against quotas in general, I think that they set up incentive problems and tend to warp the general quality of whatever population that is subject to the quota. I do think that on strictly utilitarian grounds, a short term quota for women in government could be argued for. Many people here (although certainly not all) think that there are some serious issues that pertain to women that are getting scant notice from the government. Things like FGM (female genital mutilation), childhood marriages, and the staggering amount of illiteracy in women don’t seem to be getting the attention that they deserve. If women controlled 15% of parliament, they could really shake things up, regardless of their party affiliation. In parliamentary procedures, coalitions are everything. A 15% block will wield significant power.
There are a bunch of practical issues to be dealt with. How you can have an election AND quotas is a bit beyond me, what if not enough people want women in there to meet the quotas? You can imagine how much this would warp party politics. If this is left in place for too long, it may actually limit women’s power in the parliament. If people feel that there is a quota, they may come to the feeling that 15% is the correct number and not vote additional women in. Or even more likely, the parliament will use the quota as a de-facto limit as a way of keeping the old order in power. In any case, it sure will be interesting to see what happens, the idea of a quota seems to have popularity across party lines so it may actually come to pass. I wonder what kind of an impact it’ll have here…