Political parties should also place them in seats where they stand a good chance of winning.

THIS must be the first time that a prominent male Umno state leader has publicly called for the party president to nominate more women candidates in the general election.

Negri Sembilan Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Mohamad Hassan, pointing to the 19 women heads of department in his home state, said on Thursday that he wants to see more women in Parliament and the state legislative assemblies.

I hope he has translated his words into action by ensuring that the Barisan Nasional candidates list he has submitted to Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak includes at least 30% women nominated for the nine parliamentary seats and 36 state seats in Negri Sembilan.

In Pahang, State PAS commissioner Datuk Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man seems to think it is a matter of pride to announce he would not field any women candidate because “they are not ready to serve as full-time politicians due to work and other commitments”.

To add insult to injury, he mentioned that two women had been included in his list as “third-choice candidates” for the Pekan and Rompin parliamentary seats. I guess just in case an act of God struck down the two male candidates above them, only then would these women qualify.

One does wonder if Tuan Ibrahim realises that he lives in the 21st century. Or is he out to sabotage his own party?

I hope the PAS national leadership will prove that they are indeed serious about becoming more open and modern by fielding more women candidates.

Already, Wanita PKR leader Zuraida Kamaruddin has announced that the party is unable to fulfil its commitment to fielding 30% women candidates in this general election because it is still searching and pushing for more women “to come in”. However, she said the party is committed to fielding more women candidates than in 2008.

DAP’s Teresa Kok has also promised that more women candidates will be fielded this time. I certainly hope all the other political parties will at the very least nominate not only more women candidates, but also place them in seats where they stand a good chance of winning.

Malaysia has the dubious honour of being ranked 110 out of 134 countries in the area of women’s political participation in the 2010 World Gender Gap Report. That a high middle-income country like Malaysia should find itself at the bottom of the pile should be of serious concern to our policymakers and political leadership.

There were only 24 (10.8%) women out of 222 in the 12th Parliament. This is worse than the Asian average of 18.4% or even the Arab average of 15.7%. It is worse in the state assemblies – 46 women only (7.9%) out of 576. It’s better in the Senate with 16 (26.7%) out of 64 because they were nominated to the position, but still a drop from 2004 figure of 33.3%.

And now we only have one woman minister left in the Cabinet line-up of 29 ministers, and only eight women (20%) out of a total of 40 deputy ministers.

At the state level, Selangor performs best with 40% women in the state exco line-up, while most other states have the token one or two women exco members.

In Terengganu, Perak and Sarawak, not a single woman was appointed.

Are women activists the only people squirming at the sight of these drab official pictures of the federal Cabinet and state excos where you see a line-up of nothing but men in dark suits and the token woman in a corner with a dash of colour?

It is as much foolish and irrational as it is archaic that our political leaders still don’t get it that diversity in representation makes for better decision-making, that women politicians serve their constituents better, if not as well as their male counterparts and that a country that ignores 50% of its talent pool cannot possibly build a democracy and a political culture that represents the diverse interests and values of the nation as a whole.

So where is the country’s transformation programme when it comes to women’s political participation?

In a list of 33 countries which has achieved at least 30% women’s representation in the Lower House of Parliament, 27 have achieved this through some form of electoral quota system.

Only Andorra, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, and Seychelles achieved this critical mass of women in Parliament without any kind of quota.

Interestingly, too, it is Rwanda, not any of the Nordic countries, that has the highest percentage of women in Parliament at 56.3%.

The Global Database on Quotas for Women showed that of those 27 countries, 20 had adopted legislated quotas, while seven countries saw political parties adopting quotas voluntarily.

These were Sweden, Nicaragua, Iceland, Norway, Mozambique, The Netherlands and Germany.

It is obvious that without political will, a strong policy plus an action plan with a timeline for full implementation by all the major political parties, Malaysian women will continue to languish in the political arena.

Our performance in the education field is not at all reflected in our advancement in politics or economics. And the impediments are both structural and cultural.

Given the lack of progress and the resistance from patriarchs to women’s representation, it is time that this country seriously considers adopting a legislated quota system, with an institutional body that monitors implementation and imposes legal sanctions for non-compliance.

Once values and attitudes towards women’s leadership have changed, this quota meant to redress a historical injustice can be dropped.

For now, I can only pray that when the political parties unveil their nomination lists, every major party would have at least increased their women candidates from their 2008 lists and placed them in winnable seats.

That would signal a purposeful start to recognising the reality of women’s status today.

■ For more election stories, please visit The Star’s GE13 site

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