UN: Irish women are among the worst represented in parliament by politicians of their own gender, according to a new survey.
The survey, by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and published yesterday at the United Nations headquarters in New York, shows that women represent just 15.7 per cent of parliamentarians worldwide.
In the case of Ireland, however, the figure is worse than the global average. In the Dáil, women account for just 13.5 per cent of TDs - 22 members out of a total of 166 TDs returned at the May 2002 general election.
In world ranking terms, that puts Ireland in joint 63rd place with Barbados and below Malawi and Guinea-Bissau. However, Ireland can take pride in having a higher percentage of women in parliament than Gambia, Korea and Zambia - 64th, 65th and 66th, respectively.
Ten years after the world conference on women was held in Beijing, the proportion of women politicians at national level has improved, but no country in the world has achieved gender equality in its parliament.
In the Arab world the percentage of women deputies has doubled in five years to 6.5 per cent, but it continues to lag far behind other regions, according to the survey. The annual statistics show "steady but slow" progress since the Beijing talks when women represented 11.3 per cent of national assembly members.
"Improvement is still well below the target of gender parity in the parliaments of the world," said Chilean senator Sergio Paez, president of the IPU, which links 140 parliaments.
While the Nordic countries have the highest regional ranking, followed by the Americas, the low number of women members of parliament in the Arab world continues to require attention, it said.
A few countries (Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia) accounted for much of the regional improvement, but the upward trend was likely to continue with the January 30th election in Iraq and "political reforms in a number of countries", it added.
Rwanda topped the chart for the second consecutive year - with 48.8 per cent of women in the lower house and 34.6 per cent in the upper house - while Sweden remained in second place, the IPU said.
Sweden also had the most women ministers (52.4 per cent), followed by Spain (50 per cent).
"This makes Sweden virtually the only country in the world that has fulfilled the principle of gender parity in politics," it said.
However, women continue to encounter "serious obstacles" on the way to the top positions of government. The number of female heads of state or government actually declined to 4.2 per cent today from 4.7 per cent in 2000, according to the IPU.
The worst results are for Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (in that order) which are not listed as having any women in parliament.
The full report and tabulated results may be read at www.ipu.org/english/home.htm