Women in Parliament: Average Contribution 60% Less than Men
by Manthri.lk - Research Team Team posted almost 11 years ago in Analysis
For a South Asian Country, Sri Lanka might be considered relatively
progressive, given the high positions that have been held by women: Sri Lanka boasts
the world’s first woman prime minister, has had a woman executive president, a
woman as chief justice and a woman attorney general.
Yet, the current parliament does not reflect the boast.
Women are not
thriving in parliament: Only 13 of the 225
members of parliament (MPs) are women (5.8%). That puts Sri Lanka at the bottom
of the pile amongst SAARC countries (behind Pakistan, Bangladesh, India,
Maldives and Bhutan) in terms of percentage of women in parliament and is
ranked 130 out of 188 in the world according to the ranking by the Inter-Parliamentary
Union.
If that does not seem too good, then the
analysis from Manthri.lk, a parliamentary monitoring platform, suggests that it
is in fact even worse. Manthri.lk measures productive contribution by MPs in parliament.
The contribution by women, for the period May 2012 to August 2013, is about
2.4% of the total. That means not only are women terribly under-represented in
parliament, but their contribution is lower than average: less than half the
contribution from their male counterparts!
The average contribution of the five women in opposition is greater than
of the women in government; but when the women MPs in opposition and in
government are assessed relative to their male counterparts in opposition and
government each group of women MPs are contributing only about 40% (that is,
60% less than the men).
This is despite three women MPs in government being of Ministerial rank:
Minister for Power and Energy, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, and Deputy
Minister for Water Supply and Drainage.
But averages do hide a wide variance amongst women MPs’ performance.
Some women MPs do
much better: there is indeed a large gap between the highest
and lowest women contributor in parliament, in both the opposition and the
government groups. In each case, the highest contributed over six times as much
as the lowest, and about twice as much as the average contribution from their
group.
Yet, the data does not exonerate any of the women MPs. The highest
contributing women MPs from both the government and the opposition contribute
less than the average male MP in the respective groups.
The implication is simple: women MPs in Sri Lanka need to up their game.
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