THIERY CHARLIER/AP WOMEN'S LIBERATOR: Diamantopoulou wants to use E.U. legislation to put an end to discrimination

Politics: The Trouble With Quotas

Posted Sunday, September 14, 2003; 13.05BS
In France, gender quotas for political parties have been in place since 2000. Most elections are based on proportional representation, so party lists must include an equal number of female and male candidates. But after the 2002 National Assembly elections, women held only 12.3% of seats — a mere 1.4% increase over the 1997 elections. The largest political parties chose to accept fines rather than fill half their lists with women. And some French women say they understand why. Equality "shouldn't be imposed, it should be logical," says Marguerite Capelle, a student at the élite Paris university, Institute of Political Studies. "The law is not going to change the minds of people."

But others say a polite shove is sometimes needed. They insist that France's largest parties failed to meet the quota requirements because powerful men didn't want to relinquish their positions to women. "There is still a lot of machismo," says Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist Party (PS) member who is also deputy mayor of Paris and a city councilwoman.

Even the left-leaning PS, which introduced the parity law in the first place, supplied an electoral list composed of only 36% women. Hidalgo says that there were ample female candidates available at the time but that the party leadership wouldn't place them on the list. "We're still fighting an old-school mentality," says Annick Lepetit, a deputy in the National Assembly.

In some of the places where women have been most successful in politics — in Sweden, for example — they have achieved more access through voluntary quotas. But even that strategy can prove superficial. In the 1980s, several parties in Denmark, including the Social Democratic Party (SD), embraced 40% quotas. Then, in 1996, thinking equality had been achieved, they abandoned the requirement. "The young women in the party felt they didn't need such rules," says Drude Dahlerup, a Danish professor of political science at Stockholm University. But in the next election for the European Parliament, all four Social Democrat front-runners were men. It was an embarrassment — so Ritt Bjerregaard, Denmark's European Commissioner, campaigned for a lower-placed woman who went on to win a seat.

Quotas, as the most reliable way to boost female representation, will probably take hold in other E.U. countries. But it isn't clear that they can equalize themselves out of existence. And if statistical equality is hard to achieve in politics — where most people agree ruling bodies should reflect populations — it will be rougher still in the private sector.

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