" If woman is eligible to mount the scaffold, she is worthy of entering parliament".

Olympe de Gouges, a French playwright, journalist and political activist, the author of the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen"

Oct 03, 2014
by
Halyna Koshulap/Kozhushko - Ukraine County Chapter Coordinator, Women’s Democracy Network

Reaching gender equality in decision-making has remained a challenge for Ukraine over its 23 years of its independence. As a result of 2012 parliamentary elections, the ratio of women MPs in the Parliament is still below 10 percent. According to the Global Gender Gap report in 2013, Ukraine holds the 119th place out of 136 countries in political empowerment of women despite its commitment within the UN Millennium goals to increase women representation in the parliament by 30 percent.

As part of our effort to move Ukraine forward and become a part of Europe it is critical that we increase women’s political participation and have a system in which women are able to equally compete against male candidates. One small part of this effort is a four-month election gender monitoring project launched by the Women’s Democracy Network county chapter in Ukraine, in partnership with the Women’s Consortium of Ukraine, on the eve of the snap parliamentary elections. Our WDN Ukraine Chapter is involved in such monitoring for the second time. The similar work was undertaken at the previous elections in 2012, which makes it possible for us to compare the findings and measure the progress in observation of women’s political rights in Ukraine over the past two years.

Our idea is to monitor female representation in political parties’ candidate lists, single-mandate districts and election management positions. In addition, we are going to monitor the media’s reflection of women throughout the campaign, voters’ participation and parties’/candidates’ electoral platforms.

This monitoring will be funded by the USAID project of “Ukraine National Initiatives to Enhance Reforms” (UNITER) implemented by Pact. It was initiated by the WDN member Maria Alekseyenko and gender expert Larysa Magdyuk who are actually coordinating the project in close cooperation with the WDN Ukraine Country Chapter. Our first step was adjusting the ‘Women in Politics’ website for the purposes of the election gender monitoring. As of now, we are accumulating information on women candidates taken from the websites of the State and local election committees, political parties, and other open resources. The information will be updated on the ‘Women in Politics’ website on a daily basis.

Based on the collected information, the full analysis of the election campaign will be compiled into one comprehensive document to be presented at the press conference in the post-campaign period to all interested parties, including IRI and other international stakeholders. Each section will be developed by a different expert. The material will be processed based on the methodology of the gender monitoring conducted during 2012 parliamentary elections.

I do hope that the gender monitoring of 2014 parliamentary elections will be successful not only in terms of analyzing the electoral campaign through a gender perspective but will also help to raise people’s awareness about the importance of women’s equal participation in decision-making at the national level. The project will hopefully attract attention of Ukrainian mass media to the issue of gender parity in politics and they will start writing about it on a much larger scale. Like it was during the previous gender monitoring in 2012, our chapter members are going to use new social media to popularize women candidates so that they could become more competitive during the campaign.

I am also inspired by the fact that a number of civic organizations, experts and active citizens are ready to create a wide network for implementing this joint project, often on a volunteer basis, as it was in 2012, using similar tools and methodology developed during the previous election campaign. Democracy cannot be established without everyday work. Women’s participation in elections and decision-making on the whole is an inseparable component of democracy development; that is why the Women’s Democracy Network will continue to play a leading role in such projects and I am very proud to be part of this work.

Про досвід гендерного моніторингу парламентських виборів, який було вперше проведено в Україні в 2012 та повторно - в 2014 році.