A Female Parliamentary Majority in Just One Country: Rwanda

New York Times - Economix
Catherine Rampell
March 9, 2010

As my colleague Lydia Polgreen writes, the upper house of India’s Parliament passed a bill on Tuesday that would amend the Constitution to reserve a third of the seats in India’s national and state legislatures for women. Such a provision may sound extreme, but it is nothing new: According to the Quota Project, about half of the world’s countries currently use some type of electoral quota for their national legislatures, in some cases enforced by political parties. (India has previously experimented with quotas for women in local elections.)

Still, women are underrepresented in almost every national parliament around the world, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and they are especially underrepresented in India’s. Around the world, 18.8 percent of national parliamentary positions are held by women; in India, the rate is about half that.

The United States is almost exactly in the middle, ranking 91st out of 186 countries ordered by the share of lower-house seats held by women.

Among those 186 countries, exactly one has a parliamentary house where women are in the majority: Rwanda.

Unlike India, Rwanda already has a constitutional requirement that at least 30 percent of its parliamentary seats must go to women. In 2008, however, it overshot the mark, and elected women to 45 out of parliamentary 80 seats, or 56.25 percent.

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