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When women in different parts of the world struggled to win the right to vote, they expected that the right to vote would inevitably lead to greater women's representation. Their expectations were not met, as chapters in this volume have illustrated. Instead, women embarked on another long and difficult struggle to actually get women elected to parliament. Part of this effort involved convincing women voters to support women as their representatives. In most countries, much of the work centred on political parties, the typical channels of entry to national legislatures. Women inside and outside political parties organized and mobilized themselves to change long-established party methods of political recruitment.
Once women entered parliament, their struggle was far from over. In parliament, women enter a male domain. Parliaments were established, organized and dominated by men, acting in their own interest and establishing procedures for their own convenience. There was no deliberate conspiracy to exclude women. It was not even an issue. Most long-established parliaments were a product of political processes that were male-dominated or exclusively male. Subsequent legislatures were, for the most part, modelled on these established assemblies. Inevitably, these male dominated organizations reflect certain male biases, the precise kind varying by country and culture.
Until recently, this "institutional masculinity" has been an invisible characteristic of legislatures; it was embedded, pervasive and taken for granted. Only recently have legislatures' masculine biases come under scrutiny. Indeed, in most countries, the political role of women in legislatures has become a public issue only in the second half of the twentieth century.
Today, women constitute 11.7 per cent of legislative members world-wide. In the Nordic countries, their numbers are highest at 36.4 per cent, while in the Arab States their representation is only 3.3 per cent. 1
As with previous efforts to try to get women elected to parliament, today women inside parliament are organizing, mobilizing, motivating, and advancing women from inside the world's legislatures. They are devising strategies and taking action to promote issues relevant to women and facilitate changes in legislation.
The actual impact women parliamentarians can make will depend on a number of variables that vary from country to country. These include the political context in which the assembly functions, the type and number of women who are in parliament, and the rules of the parliamentary game. Each of these factors has a significant bearing on the extent to which women MPs can make a difference once elected. Because these factors vary significantly from country to country, it is difficult to make generalizations that are universally relevant regarding how women MPs can maximize their impact.
In addition, there is very little research and information available on what sort of impact women have made. Underscoring the need for more knowledge and understanding in this particular field of women and decision-making, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) said in a recent report that there is an urgent need for case studies on "women making a difference" in politics. 2
Extrapolating from what is available in this field, and based on interviews and discussions with women MPs around the world, we have identified some of the strategies and mechanisms women are using and can use to impact on the process. We have formulated a strategy, what we refer to as the "rules strategy", to organize and present these ideas. The case studies on South Africa and Norway that follow illustrate some of these strategies in action.
The extent of women's impact will depend very much on the number of women in parliament who are motivated to represent women's issues and concerns.
Feminists often argue that pioneer women parliamentarians became surrogate men that they were socialized into the legislature and became indistinguishable from the men they replaced. We doubt this. Men are known to behave differently when women are absent. Because it upsets gender boundaries, the presence of even one woman will alter male behaviour; the presence of several women will alter it even further. West European experience shows that where women MPs have a mission to effect change even small numbers can produce significant results.
While the presence of even one woman can make a difference, long-term significant change will largely be realized when there is a sufficient number of women in parliament who are motivated to represent women's concerns. This need for a significant minority of women to affect political change has been referred to by feminist political scientists as "critical mass". According to Drude Dahlerup, the test that a critical mass of women is present is the acceleration of the development of women's representation through acts that improve the situation for themselves and for women in general. These actions are critical acts of empowerment.
In her studies of women MPs in Scandinavia, Dahlerup found that women politicians worked to recruit other women, and developed new legislation and institutions to benefit women. As their numbers grew it became easier to be a woman politician and public perceptions of women politicians changed. 3
In this chapter, we have formulated a strategy to help maximize women's impact on the legislative process. The full development of this rules strategy requires a critical mass of women working on and promoting women's concerns.
Simply put, the strategy consists of three parts: learning the rules, using the rules, and changing the rules. By rules we mean the customs, conventions, informal practices and specific regulations that govern the way a legislature functions. These include law-making processes, division of labour in the assembly, hierarchy structures, ceremonies, disciplines, traditions, habits and the norms of the assembly including its internal functioning and its relationship to other parts of the government and to the nation it has been elected to serve.
This strategy of learning, using and changing the rules is based on the belief that there is a need for change and that an objective in electing women MPs is to secure change. There are essentially four types of change that will make a difference to women. They can be categorized as institutional/procedural, representation, influence on output, and discourse.
1. Institutional/procedural change refers to measures that alter the nature of the institution to make it more "woman-friendly". Cultural changes, such as greater gender awareness, should be accompanied by procedural changes designed to accommodate women members. Increased gender awareness is not simply a matter of including women, but also a sensitivity that women are no more a universal category than are men, and that class, age, ethnicity, race, physical ability, sexuality, parenting and life stage, have a determining effect on women's lives, much the same as they do on men's lives.
2. Representation change involves specific actions to secure women's continued and enhanced access to the legislature. These include encouragement of women candidates; a conscious use of role model capacities; the promotion of sex equality legislation, parity or equality regulations; and appropriate changes in electoral and campaigning laws. Representation change also includes actions in parliament that are designed to place women in important parliamentary positions and to secure their presence in government. It must also include changes in political parties that bring more women to legislatures. Parliamentary women often use the power their representative status gives them to support improving political opportunities for women in their parties. Similarly, parliamentary women may organize to support women for higher office. Parliaments constitute a crucial pool of recruitment to higher office.
3. Impact / Influence on output refers specifically to the "feminization" of legislation and other policy outputs, i.e., the extent to which laws and policies have been altered or influenced in women's favour. This includes both putting women's issues on the agenda and ensuring that all legislation is woman-friendly or gender-sensitive.
4. Discourse change involves changes both inside and outside of parliament. Not only should efforts be made to alter parliamentary language so that women's perspectives are normalized, it is also necessary to make use of the parliamentary platform to alter public attitudes and to change the discourse of politics so that a political woman becomes as normal a concept as a political man. Such "speaking out the window" uses the parliamentary opportunity of greater access to the mass media and to the general public to raise awareness of women's issues and of women's political capacities in public debate.
Network with women's organizations;
Mentoring and shadowing by more senior MPs;
Understand and handle media.
Caucus with media, national as well as international organizations;
Bring to attention sexist discourse;
Establish presence within different committees (e.g. budget, defence, foreign affairs);
Clarify value and importance of "soft" committees.
Draw attention to absence of women in key positions;
Invest in committee work;
Push for and establish government equal opportunity positions and women's ministries;
Campaign to expand existing structures to include women's concerns;
Set up networks to train in more convincing and less adversarial types of debate.
Establish public enquiries on women's issues and use findings to place issues on government agendas and within legislative programmes;
Speak for, co-sponsor and sponsor bills;
Seek partnership with male colleagues;
Make public issue out of certain concerns by co-operating with media (e.g. ways of referring to women in parliament, sexual harassment issues).
Introduce quota systems on certain committees or issue of proportionality for men/women representation;
Establish a woman's whip;
Establish national machinery to monitor implementation and ensure accountability; institutionalize regular debates on progress into parliamentary timetable;
Establish mechanisms to encourage female speakers (e.g. giving them priority over male colleagues).
Co-operate with women's movement to change image of women as "only" housewives, to portray them as effective and efficient politicians, and to normalize the image of a woman politician;
Be proud of identity as a woman, instead of attempting to imitate men and hide or deny womanhood;
Expand legislation to include emerging issues of importance to women
(e.g. conflict and peace-making, human rights, special women's budgets).
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