Representation and Inclusion

Abstract

In 1995, the fourth and most influential world conference on women delivered the Beijing Declaration, calling for “women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power.” The idea that women needed not just the equal right to vote and participate in politics, but “full participation on the basis of equality,” had been gathering force for a number of years. Activists around the world had long challenged the underrepresentation of women in legislatures and decision-making assemblies. Political parties in the Scandinavian countries had been experimenting with voluntary gender quotas from the early 1980s. In the course of the 1990s, a number of countries, particularly in Latin America, made it a legal or constitutional requirement that something had to be done. Votes for women were the key demand at the end of the nineteenth century; parity of representation was the new demand by the end of the twentieth.