The politics of women’s rights

Women’s participation in politics has been given due importance ever since Lydia Chapin Taft became the first legal woman voter in America in 1756.
For many decades, women have struggled and fought over their rights and made their political empowerment a high priority. The role of women in politics is no longer a mere matter of discussion. Women like Hillary Clinton have made great strides for women in politics but even she has opined that women have still not succeeded fully, and need to continue to work towards gender equality in politics.
According to the International Parliamentary Union, women’s participation in politics stands at 18.6 percent worldwide and 18.3 percent in Asia. Women are still under-represented in politics.
At home, it took a long time for women to break to break into politics even at the local government level before democracy was formally established in Bhutan.
Although gender relation in Bhutan has been more egalitarian, Sultana Kamal, member and Executive Director of Human Rights and Legal Aid Organization, said women are politically under-represented in Bhutan. Women members accounted for only 8.5 percent of the National Assembly and 24 percent of the National Council.
A Bhutanese member of parliament said women in Bhutan were reluctant to join politics and that eventually translated into political under-representation.
“Women in Bhutan need to change their mindset. There has to be a readiness to mentally accept that women also belong in politics,” he said.
But do Bhutanese women generally have the confidence to enter politics or stand up for their rights? According to one male member of the national council, that will take a long time.
“It is important to know how many Bhutanese women are really interested in politics,” he said. “They just can’t sit there and defend their mentality thinking it’s a man’s show.”
However, BT spoke to women from different backgrounds who admitted that there were many aspects to why they were not interested in politicking.
A corporate employee with a political science background said societal attitudes in Bhutan are very patriarchal. Women are discouraged by their families and by society from getting involved in public and political life.
“Times are changing now and women’s aspirations are changing but the belief that women will always be the weaker sex hasn’t changed at all,” she said.
The law in Bhutan treats men and women equally. However, behind closed doors and in individual lives, there always appears to exist some sort of gender gap.
Chulani Kodikara, a research associate for the International Center for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka, said that even if there are no formal discriminations there certainly are other less perceptible barriers that all women face, even in Bhutan.
A senior government official said there actually was no discrimination against women in politics. What really exists and is often misconceived as discrimination was the cultural belief that men belong in politics and women should be involved in different arenas. Politics is perceived as a field requiring aggression and assertion, qualities traditionally not associated with women.
‘I don’t think it is gender discrimination but it is just about the readiness of a country to accept more female politicians,” he said. “It is high time the government changed it perceptions about women.”
The Royal Civil Service Commission statistics of civil servants shows that only 13 out of 186 civil servants in the executive category, six out of 56 specialists, and 3,180 out of 7,117 in the professional and management category, are women. Out of a total of 20,698 civil servants in the country today, only 6,333 are women.
Chompoonute Kakornthap, advisor to the Foreign Minister of Thailand, believes there is a need to improve women’s participation at the higher levels of politics in Bhutan.
“But Bhutan is still only a year into democracy and it might already have had a good beginning,” she said.
Most Bhutanese women BT spoke to said education plays a very important role in raising political profiles and in giving women opportunities to access political arenas.
A female student of Kelki High School said women must be given extra priority in politics or else women’s voices in parliament will be subdued by men.
According to the National Advisor to the Millennium Development Goal project in Mongolia, Hulan Hashhbat, women’s reluctance to participate in politics also depends on the background that they have, on their families, upbringing and whether husbands supported the careers of wives in political professions.
“It is very rare to find a husband supporting his wife’s political career,” she said.