Essays On Gender And Governance - United Nations Development ...

Locating Gender in the Governance Discourse
1. Despite ostensibly universal and gender-neutral categories of
citizenship, women have continued to suffer subordination and
exclusion, both within and outside the family.
2. The availability of rights is severely compromised for those
belonging to subordinate social groups (e.g., racial or religious
or linguistic minorities or lower castes in India), and especially
so for women belonging to these groups.
3. Even in their most minimal and negative conception, rights
are frequently not available to large numbers of women. Let
alone the right to make meaningful choices about one’s life in
accordance with one’s conception of self-realization, basic civil
and political liberties are routinely denied or severely curtailed.
These include, variously, the free exercise of the right to
franchise, freedom of association and movement, the right to
be elected, reproductive rights, etc. 3
Let us examine more closely some dimensions of these three issues.
First, the question of the universal rights of equal citizenship. Since
1895, when New Zealand became the first country to give the vote
to women, most countries 4 in the world (which have elected
assemblies) recognise the right to universal adult franchise. Most
states have also ratified the major international instruments relating
to gender equality, such as the Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Fewer have ratified
the Convention on the Political Rights of Women. Some countries
have also formally referred the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) -
which interprets women’s rights as human rights - to parliament.
Most democracies, and even some non-democracies, extend the
same constitutional rights to men and women, and few legally
discriminate between the sexes. Nevertheless, the formal existence
3
In Zaire, a woman cannot open a bank account without her husband’s permission. In France,
women obtained this freedom only in 1965. It was as recently as 2000 that Egypt made it
possible for a woman to get a passport without her husband’s written consent.
4
Kuwait, the only country in the Gulf to have an elected assembly, has not yet given women
the right to vote or to stand for election. The Amiri decree of May 1999, which proposed to
give this right to women for the 2003 election, was rejected by a close vote in the new
parliament in November 1999. (Tetreault and al-Mughni, 2000)
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