Parity denied” “

“The social services are women’s best friends”: that’s the view of Raija Rimpilainen, general secretary of the Finnish Social Democratic Party, whose intervention was followed with considerable attention by the participants in the conference “Women: only electors?” held in recent days at Ancona and promoted by Italy’s national Commission for Equal Opportunities and by the equivalent regional Commission of the Marche. The conference widened its horizon to the experience of other European countries. It also reviewed the current situation of equal opportunities in Italy, where the women elected to Parliament represent only 9% of its composition, although they form the majority of the working electorate. Finland. Finnish women were the first in Europe to obtain the right to vote. That was in 1906. They were also the first in the world to win the right to be elected to parliament. The actual presence of women in the Finnish Parliament is equivalent to 44% and there are now 7 women ministers out of a total of 18 in the government, including the minister for industry. Finland has also had a woman minister of finance and even a woman president of the Republic. “Women are better educated – explained Rimpilainen – also at the university level, but they mainly devote themselves to the social sciences, teaching, art. Technology is a male preserve. Moreover, women have difficulty in achieving the highest positions in their careers: though women form the bulk of the teaching staff, 60% of the nation’s headmasters are men. In the age group between 25 and 44 there’s higher unemployment among women than among men”. Spain. Spain is situated at the opposite extreme of Finland, and not only geographically. “Only now – said Judith Astelarra, professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Barcelona – despite the fact that 25 years of democracy have elapsed, are we beginning to discuss the political representation of women. As late as the 1970s people said that the worst thing for a woman was to seek to imitate a man. In the first elections in 1977 women candidates obtained 6% of the proportional vote. Between 1989 and 2000, there was a growth of representation of woman in parliament, rising to almost 30%, also in the parliaments of the autonomous communities. It may be said to be a success, but the question we need to pose is whether this has brought any change in politics, whether women truly have the power to make new demands and challenge the status quo”. France. “In our country there’s a situation similar to that in Italy – said Geneviève Tapié, president of the ‘l’Assemblée des femmes’ and delegate of the Ministry of Women’s Rights in France – since French women were among the last to obtain the right to vote, in 1944, although universal suffrage had been sanctioned since 1848. In the Thirties the left did not do enough to promote women’s suffrage; the radicals in particular feared that women would vote for the right, ‘as the parishes priests would tell them to do’. So, to use them as a bastion against Communism, General De Gaulle, head of the provisional Government, proposed that women be able to vote and be electable in the same way as men”. French women duly entered the national Assembly immediately after the war with 5.6% of the vote, especially thanks to the role they had played in the Resistance, but the presence of women in parliament later dropped to 1,6%, only to recover to 10% in 1997 (at the tail-end of Europe). In the same year, prime minister Lionel Jospin pledged to augment the number of women in politics, and modified the Constitution to achieve this result. The Constitution was duly amended by Parliament on 28 June 1999, with the introduction of the formula of “equal access” of men and women to the electoral mandate and to elected office. On this basis, the so-called law “on parity” was promulgated on 6 June 2000″. France is now the first country in the world to require, for the majority of electoral ballots, an equal numbers of male and female candidates in the electoral lists. In those cases in which this law has already been applied, for example in the recent municipal elections, the number of women councillors has doubled”. Chiara Santomiero