Importance of women's political empowerement - Gurmai Zita

Importance of women's political empowerment
We need to insist on internal party democracy, on systematic development of human resources,
on merit based promotion of cadres, on development of personal and collective mentorship for
young people, especially young women. The feminist tradition of our parties has to be passed
to the younger generation in much more systematic way that this was the case until now.
Innovation #3
The experience of Women's Forum of Croatia shows that women party organizations are able
to make sure that the party includes gender aspects in every priority of its electoral program
and they are able to prepare and persuade the party to offer at least one concrete gender
equality policy as a party electoral promise to the voters.
Innovation #4
Experiences from SDP of BiH shows that when it is too difficult to make gender equality a
priority of party politics directly, women activists can do it indirectly as well, by getting on board
trade union activists who need to make much closer partnership with SD if they both intend to
develop their country in open social dialogue, without using drastic neoliberal solutions. Gender
equality became a natural part of the party electoral program and of the agreement of SD
government of BiH Federation with TU on crucial social policy issues. As women were in the
leed of this process of partnership building, this agreement is really gender equality sensitive.
Innovation #5
ECOSY leadership has discovered that the procedure of competing for the leading individual
positions within their organization is gender biased. In ECOSY they practice and should
continue to practice statute based firm positive measures to achieve gender balance in their
organizational organs, but the procedure of electing individual leaders of the organization is
much more difficult for the young women with less experience in public speaking than for young
men. They are still looking for the good solution of this problem.
Innovation #6
Several participants, veterans, as well as young ones, underlined:
It is of crucial importance not to accept the concepts and wording of our opponents on the
issues of gender equality. Instead of talking about fairness, equal opportunities and quotas, we
should talk about equality between women and men, equality of results and parity and start to
openly use and fight for the positive connotation of the notion: feminism. If we accept the
wording of the conservatives and liberals, we are stepping out of our own value system and
give prevalence to their value systems.
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