Improving Political Representation? Women’s Parliaments in Comparative Perspective

Women’s Parliaments are one or two-day affairs held in legislative or parliamentary chamber, where women elected representatives and social activists come together to advance policy and practice related to gender equality. The celebration of Women’s Parliaments transforms the male-dominated parliamentary space and has potential consequences for all dimensions of women’s political representation. Their composition mirrors the largest social constituency, enhancing descriptive representation with an exceptional over-representation of women. Women’s parliaments have the express goal of advancing and articulating policy objectives related to gender equality, and so they may contribute to substantive representation by furthering women’s issues and feminist claims in the political agenda. Finally, the performance of these plenary sessions can symbolize other ways of doing politics, such as more collegial forms of leadership and more horizontal forms of participation, deliberation, and accountability. Women’s Parliaments have been organised by national and regional legislative assemblies from diverse world regions, including Southern Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Southern Europe. This paper analyzes Women’s Parliaments in four democratic or democratizing contexts: Catalonia, Mexico, Montenegro, and South Africa, explaining how, by whom, under which conditions, and for what representative purposes Women’s Parliaments are organised. We draw from the parliamentary records, interviews with Women’s Parliaments’ participants and our own participant-observation in certain cases. We find significant and important variation across cases. To begin, women parliamentarians and the women’s movement play dissimilar roles in the planning of the event and receive different amount of voice during the sessions, with consequences for the Women’s Parliaments’ agenda-setting power. Where the Women’s Parliaments enjoyed high autonomy, high visibility within the state, and proceeded collaboratively, many of their policy demands were successfully incorporated into the legislative agenda, as in Mexico and Catalonia. In South Africa and Montenegro, by contrast, the legislatures’ motives for hosting the Women’s Parliament tended more towards co-optation of women’s and feminist demands. Elites used the Women’s Parliaments as window-dressing, concerned more with demonstrating their commitment to gender equality to domestic and/or international audiences than with actually unveiling, listening to, and following through on women’s and feminist demands. This comparative analysis shows the importance of understanding that, as gendered institutions themselves, Women’s Parliaments play important but not uncomplicated roles in advancing women’s descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Positive effects depend on whether Women’s Parliaments are autonomous spaces and on the processes established for participation, deliberation, and decision-making. We argue that convening and holding Women’s Parliaments raises critical questions about the interaction between women elected officials, the women’s movement, and other legislative and state actors, thereby furthering our understanding of when social movements and the state collaborate to advance a gender equality agenda—or when gender equality becomes co-opted or sanitized by other elite actors.