Importance of women's political empowerement - Gurmai Zita

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Overcoming gender under-representation or the microphone effect
shouldn’t despair, life is ahead of us and there will for sure be future glories in store. He calls
Ms A to the front.
Ms A walks up to the speakers’ desk, clutching her papers. She takes a deep breath and starts
delivering her prepared speech. “Louder!” come the shouts from the back of the room. “Use the
microphone!” Ms A is knocked out of her stride; she apologises and nervously starts twiddling
with the buttons on the microphone. It doesn’t work. “It was on!” comes the booming voice of
the technician, wagging his head. Ms A makes another attempt at speaking into the
microphone: a bone-chilling whistle emanates from the speakers, the audience shudders. Ms A,
gathering her courage, quickly reads through her speech, outlining her well-researched and
well-budgeted activity plan for the mandate, and the clearly defined goals she wants to reach by
the end of it. Her speech is greeted with a polite applause from the audience and franatic
placard-waving from her friends: on coming down from the stage she is greeted with a broad
flourish by Mr B, congratulating her on her excellent speech and wishing her good luck. He
makes a show of kissing her on both cheeks: she wishes he wouldn’t do that.
Mr B takes the stage. Loud chants: “Can’t you see, vote for B!” A broad arm-gesture calms the
crowd; Mr B adjusts the microphone to his height. He opens by complimenting Ms A (perhaps a
quick comment on her radiant looks) and ensuring the audience that he will be happy for the
world whoever wins, it’s an honest contest. The microphone breaks down altogether; Mr B
undauntedly pushes it aside, continuing at the top of his voice. In a speech of booming
rhetorical impressiveness, he talks about his childhood and how his classmates in primary
school convinced him to enter politics: he promises to end the crisis, destroy capitalism and
achieve world peace. Applause, more loud chants.
Mr B is elected by a landslide.
Though the story contains a few slight exaggerations, I have seen most of its elements occur
dozens of times when watching or visiting election congresses of socialist and social
democratic youth organisations. A few times the story unfolded more or less in its entirety:
either way, it is clear that desperately few women succeed in being elected when in direct, oneto-one
competition against men. If they run at all, that is: even in cases where hard gender
quota is in place, the number of male candidates tends to be a multiple of the number of female
candidates for any position. The cause can easily be identified as the gendered nature of
traditional political and electoral processes.
Most of these processes involve formal speeches, large and unmoderated audiences,
interaction with (almost invariably male) illustrious predecessors, small talk with (near)
strangers, improvisation and sound systems, all of which belong to the domain constructed as
male in our society. It is of course possible for individual women to make these processes their
own and reach office anyway, but this cannot achieve gender equality in the political field since
the women in question are anyway accorded “male” attributes by society, so they by definition