Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [72]
I just think that there’s something particularly ironic about men legislating our rights away—and we’ve got to stop letting it happen.
What Other Countries Do
When I was in grad school, I interned at a great international women’s organization called the Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), where I would later go on to work full-time. While there, I worked on a campaign in its Gender and Governance program called the 50/50 Campaign.22 The campaign seeks to increase women’s representation and participation in all decision-making processes worldwide, with an emphasis on national parliaments.
WEDO reached out to women on local and regional levels, and almost three hundred organizations and eighteen national and regional campaigns were launched. The priorities of the campaign include “political party reform, which includes adopting gender balance strategies” and campaign finance reform.23
Basically, the idea is that most campaign finance systems favor incumbents—and since most incumbents are men . . . well, you get the idea. The political party reform is a bit more controversial. The 50/50 campaign advocates establishing quotas as a way to increase women’s representation in decision-making positions.
So this means that a certain percentage of candidate or political office seats are reserved for women. Controversial? Yes, definitely. Americans don’t like the word “quotas,” that’s for sure. But it’s proven way effective. All countries achieved critical mass (30 percent) of women politicians after implementing party or legal quotas.
Party quotas are voluntary; political parties guarantee that a certain percentage of women will be selected as election candidates. Political parties in Austria, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Mozambique, Norway, Sweden, and South Africa use this system.
Legal quotas make it mandatory for political parties to set aside a certain percentage of parliamentary seats for women. If parties don’t comply, they can be disqualified from the election or have government campaign funding withdrawn. Legal quotas are used in Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, France, and Rwanda.24
I don’t think the United States will be implementing quotas anytime soon—and I don’t even know if this is the answer for us—but I wanted to put it out there.
The thing is, the idea behind achieving a critical mass of women in political decision-making positions comes from the idea that there is policy change when there are more women in politics. Some say that this is that kind of “good” sexism: like, women are not corrupt, or we’re cooler on issues affecting other women. It kind of presupposes that just by having vaginas, we’re going to make good policy decisions. Kind of makes me uncomfortable.
Patsy Mink was the first Asian American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1964; in 1968, shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman to be elected.
But that said, there seems to be some truth to this line of thought. Countries with the highest percentages of women in politics tend to have great policies affecting women’s lives.
Sweden, for example, which has one of the highest percentages of women in political office in the world, has amazing policies for women: Because of employment laws, women’s salaries are, on average, 90 percent of men’s,25 and the country has an amazing public childcare system.26
But then again, who’s to say that’s not because the government is more progressive as a whole? It’s debatable—so seriously, look into these things and figure out what you think for yourself.
Stop Futzing Around
So the moral of the story is that yes, sometimes politics truly can suck for women (voters and politicians). But that doesn’t mean we can just wash our hands of the whole thing.
Women can create change on all sorts of levels (my favorite being straight-up activism), but electoral politics is something we