Equalizing representation of men and women in decision-making

Throughout the world, women are still largely underrepresented in important decision-making positions. The international community and the European Union have acknowledged the need to equalize representation of men and women in these positions, because underrepresentation forms an important obstacle to the democratic development of countries. Increasing the levels of representation by women is also seen as a necessary condition for women’s interests to be taken into account in decision-making, which is important for the improvement of the general level of gender equality and the position of women in society. The national Parliament is a very important decision-making body in a democratic system. It is chosen by the voting population, and it has an important voice in national decision-making. The proportions of women Members of Parliament (MP’s) differ largely between European countries. In 2006, European Member States had between 9% and 48% women Parliamentarians. The central research question of this thesis is which factors could explain these large differences in women Parliamentarians. In order to find an explanation for these differences, three countries with high proportions of women MP’s (Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands) and three countries with low proportions of women MP’s (Greece, France, Ireland) are compared on several variables. Besides a focus on factors in the political system, features of the administration and socio-economic factors are also taken into account. The selection of the research variables is based on existing literature. This thesis concludes that current proportions of women in Parliament can be explained primarily by the extent to which women’s organizations have made claims for equal representation, and the extent to which political parties have responded to these claims with programmatic and organizational change. Hypotheses concerning features of the administration and socio-economic forces could not be confirmed. Further research should include more countries to increase the reliability of the results, and should select the cases based on variety in de explaining variables in order to actually establish causality.