Monday, July 17, 2006

Yea. Number 68.

Countries as diverse as Britain, Chile, Liberia and Israel have elected women to their highest political office. When it comes to female representation in national parliaments, the U.S. ranks 68th in the world....

Even the new democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan have a greater percentage of female representatives than does Congress, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international group based in Geneva, Switzerland...

In 2003, the number of women in Rwanda's National Assembly doubled, largely due to the creation of a constitutionally mandated quota. Since that year, Rwanda has been No. 1 in the global ranking of women in national parliaments, with 48.8 percent of its assembly made up of women.


(via angryblackbitch)

1 comments so far. Got something to say?

clindsay said...

Rwanda. Um, yeah. Okay. Not really a country I'd use as a chining example of anything.

I don't believe in quotas, andd I certainly wouldn't want to be included in anything if the only reason I'm there is that there's a quota to fill.

I had enough of quotas when I was trying to get $$$ to go to college while supporting my mother full-time and was told repeatedly that according to someone's statistic, because I was white, I was supposed to be able to pay for college on my own, while classmates who had wealthy parents (and lower grades than mine) and happened to be the ethnicity du jour in the State of California were getting piles of cash scholarships simply because they were filling numbers on somebody's quota. Yeah, in the United States, if you are poor and white, you apparently don't exist.

Don't get me started on quotas and Affirmative Action!