Promoting gender balanced decision-making in the European Union: International and transnational strategies for parity democracy

Abstract

In this paper I aim to address a number of gaps in the current literature on women's political representation. First, I present a genealogy of international efforts to target "decision-making" as a policy area crucial to promoting substantive equality between women and men. While I signal the vital role of two UN documents-the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women from 1979 and the Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing from 1995-in placing "women in decision-making" on the international political agenda, I stress how actions in Western Europe have further developed the normative principles and the practical strategies necessary for effecting changes in patterns of representation ... I next discuss the shift in feminist strategy that I argue lies behind the sudden international concern with gender balanced decision-making. I trace the evolution of feminist attitudes towards politics, which I link to changing interpretations about the source of inequalities based on gender, and I note how women's activists have developed a new normative argument calling for "parity democracy" which has proven to be quite effective in bridging differences among women across the political spectrum. In the final section, I then catalogue the various practical strategies employed by the European Union to increase women's representation in the European Parliament and, by extension, in national and local assemblies.