Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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19 areas of social security, labour practice, reproductive health and management. 9 Women have been appointed in larger numbers than usual in other countries, including Ecuador, where President Correa appointed seven female government ministers, and Bolivia, where President Morales increased the number of female cabinet members and where Congress passed an alternation bill that encouraged the apportionment of 30% of the seats in the Constituent Assembly for women. Although it is premature to state that these initiatives constitute a range of possible routes to parity, the measures taken by the president of Chile, the strength of women’s organizations, the support of women’s machineries in other countries and, no less importantly, a climate of change undoubtedly exercise a significant impact which is helping to propel women into government cabinets. It must not be forgotten, however, that women’s presence in cabinets is typically highly volatile and generates a resistance that forewarns of sanctions for the entire gender should a female governor make a mistake. Women, even those in power, have not been able to prevent their individual presence from being taken to represent the entire gender, while men in positions of power have secured recognition as individuals and the mistakes of the few are not attributed to all men. One of the first criticisms that both male and female politicians level at the concept of parity is that it undermines the principle of universality, one of the pillars of modernity and democracy. Refuting that claim, Françoise Collin, a Belgian feminist philosopher, argues that adherence to the parity principle does not imply the adoption of a philosophical position (Collin, 2006). The concept of universality refers to the whole of humanity, whereas “parity” operates at the level of the citizen. The category of citizenship is narrower that than of humanity, since it is always inscribed within the framework of a particular State and legal system and, hence, cannot be universalistic. Citizenship is circumscribed externally by a country’s borders and internally by systems of inclusion and exclusion. Women claim their rights —in this case, to represent their co-citizens— as citizens and as members of one of the two communities that constitute and reproduce humanity. Accordingly, parity represents a demand made in the realm of citizenship, not a philosophical stance on the fundamental status of humanity and sex. Parity reveals what was hidden behind the concept of the individual, built in the image and likeness of man. By questioning the monism of democratic universalism, the campaign for parity recognizes many ways of being an individual, of incarnating the universal and the everyday world. In this sense, parity desexualizes power by extending it to both sexes and thus it may be said to represent true universalism (Collin, 2006). Insofar as the concept of the individual citizen is not neutral, but is built on the male model, access to representation as a human being and an individual occurs in a sexed environment, characterized by the exclusion —not accidental but structural— of women. Feminist schools that assert substantive equality between men and women and those that emphasize the difference put forward different rationales for parity. Those known as universalist feminists see a flagrant contradiction between the law, which states that all citizens must be represented independently of their sex, and the reality, insofar as male and female citizens are represented almost exclusively by men, which evinces profound discrimination. In order to arrive at equality it is necessary to do away with the artificial differences between men and women, which would disappear if inequality were overcome. As this school sees it, parity representation does not imply that women speak only for women: they represent the whole of the population just as men do and can likewise be conduits for the wider interest in all its forms. Parity requires only that the basic mixed nature of humanity be represented in assemblies —parliaments, in this case. Notwithstanding their affirmations, the 9 See the gender equity system incorporated in 2002 into the Government of Chile’s administration improvement programme [online] http://www.sernam.cl/pmg.
20 universalist school’s arguments in support of parity are based on the valuation of the differences between men and women. They argue that women are better placed to achieve true equality between the sexes and that they are much more deeply committed than egalitarian men to driving forward processes conducive to real equality. Adherents to the school of feminism that emphasizes the difference between women and men base their arguments on the heterogeneity of the sexes and affirm that difference is about more than inequality. Women’s involvement in party or community leaderships brings change, because women bring something different from men, derived from their shared experience of exclusion, which is expressed in anti-patriarchal reflexes and habits that stand in opposition to the male way of engaging in politics. Although the acknowledgement of difference and of the diversity of different groups’ interests has paved the way for the consideration of specific rights and the recognition of different types of public, it is necessary to be aware of the risk of setting publicly acknowledged differences in stone and treating them as inalterable. People who take a historical perspective are able to adopt other points of view nourished by different approaches and histories. At the political level, feminists’ reservations about parity are based on their scepticism that, by itself, the entry of women to politics will suffice to desexualize the power of a system that was solidly structured without them, much less if they lack an understanding of gender inequalities and have not proposed prior shared objectives to change the system. Feminists argue that the sole fact of being women does not guarantee representatives the clarity and willpower to uphold the interests of marginalized members of their sex. They also ask where the real power mechanisms are in contemporary society. This question is especially important in the context of globalization, with other power spheres emerging in the economy and politics that transcend national States. These spheres are inhabited largely by men and exert pressure on national States. Feminists also question whether women in power and the feminist movement can represent women as a group. Like the different strands of parity feminism, they signal the risk of falling for the fiction that women are a homogenous group and challenge the feminist movement’s capacity to represent them all. The movement can never represent all women or all the elements that may identify them. Beyond the general observation that women are oppressed, it must be admitted that the female condition in the singular is a fiction and that women experience multiple social realities. Feminist campaigns have themselves increased the diversity among women —inevitably, since the collective effort has aimed to empower women as subjects and free them from the domination of others. From this perspective, the campaign for parity is one of the forces at work in the reactivation of democracy and gender equality and it coexists with other campaigns driven by forces within civil society, the public arena and the State. Parity in political representation has, generally speaking, been coupled with strategies aimed at generating the conditions for women’s parity participation in all social, private and public realms. Indeed, the achievement of equality requires social pacts that enable all adult members of society to interact as equals. This, in turn, cannot happen without equitable distribution of material resources and the recognition of independence and of the different voices in society. H. THE CAMPAIGN FOR POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN THE REGION Latin American women’s campaign for citizenship and political representation has evinced specific features resulting from the economic, social and institutional characteristics of the countries and their
Page 2 and 3: LC/L.2738(CRM.10/3) August 2007 The
Page 4 and 5: 1 FOREWORD The Economic Commission
Page 6 and 7: 3 INTRODUCTION The women of Latin A
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69 seeks to reform the constitution
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71 Box II.4 REGULATION OF EMPLOYMEN
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75 sex and activity (see figure II.
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79 Figure II.7 LATIN AMERICA (SIMPL
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81 Box II.6 HAITI. DOMESTIC WORKERS
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87 Box II. 7 (concluded) To sum up,
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89 are also inaccurate, which widen
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91 Some progress has been made sinc
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93 Figure II.15 AVERAGE HOURS SPENT
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95 Country Costa Rica El Salvador G
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105 Box II.12 EXAMPLES OF SOCIAL SE
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107 III. TOWARDS A RESEARCH AND POL
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109 (iii) Contribute to the mainten
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111 Appendix TECHNICAL NOTES The st
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113 Household survey information al
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115 sub-module “home maintenance
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118 _____ (2003), "Políticas para
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120 Carrasco, Cristina (2001), “H
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122 _____ (2003b), “Redes de apoy
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124 Huenchuan, Sandra and José Mig
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126 Montaño, Sonia (2007a), “Emp
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128 Rico, María Nieves (2006), “
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130 _____ (1979), Convention on the
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