ACCORDING TO EUROSTAT'S FIGURES, 51% of the bloc’s population are women. However, they are not fairly represented in what claims to be European people’s sovereignty seat: female MP’s mean roughly 37% of the European Parliament. Historical data reveal they have never reached 40%.
SOURCES OF THE EUROPEAN CHAMBER argue that there has been significant progress in the last years (since 2009, the women’s share has increased 6%) and highlight that the current 37% is above the average in the national parliaments of the Member States, which is 28%, according to the latest data from the Inter-Parliamentarian Union (IPU). However, there is no regulation at a European level forcing parties aspiring to get seats in Strasbourg to comply with any threshold that guarantees gender balance. A report from the European Parliament in May 2014 considered that “almost sixty years on since the Treaty of Rome, there remains a persistent under-representation of women in political assemblies across Europe. Gaps remain and women continue to be a minority in the political sphere”. The document calls upon governments and national parliaments to adopt measures such as gender quotas, “as they have proven more effective to achieve gender balance in political decision-making in the short and medium term”. The report’s conclusions identify quotas as “pivotal” to assure women’s participation in political decision-making areas. For the same reason, the authors ask national authorities to promote equal representation of women and men in internal positions in committees and boards within the political parties.
"There are 54 Spanish MP's in the European Parliament, 43% of them being women"
WHY IS THERE NO coordinated legislation on gender quotas for the lists to the European Parliament? Each Member State decides independently on its electoral law, so the use -or even the existence- of minimum thresholds of female MP’s varies among countries. “A least for now”, says ChiaraTamburini, from the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament. “The day we will have a EU electoral legislation, I guess the issue of quota will be put on the table”, she reckons. Reality seems less optimistic, though. The European Parliament works on a EU electoral law reform and has issued a report about it. Its authors, Danuta Hübner and Jo Leinen, “encourage Member States to take measures to promote gender balance in every aspect of European elections”. They also think that it could be envisaged “to introduce some kind of wording on gender balance of candidate lists”. Nonetheless, Hübner and Leinen do not pretend to put anybody out: “Given the diversity of Member State’s approaches and the continuous political sensitivity of the issue, putting forward a softer, non-binding approach might be the wiser option at this stage”, they write.
Source: European Commission
MEMBER STATES' approaches to this issue are in fact diverse. The average of 37% conceals very different realities. For instance, there are 23 female Spanish euro-parliamentarians, which represent 43% of the total national MP’s. This places Spain among the top ten countries, at the same level as the Netherlands and above Denmark, Germany or Luxembourg.
"Malta holds the higher share of female MP's in the European Parliament: 67%"
IT COMES AS no surprise to find Finland or Sweden in the leading positions, but the head of the list is a nation nobody would think of an equality champion: Malta. The small Mediterranean island holds six seats in the European Parliament and four of them belong to women, that is, 67%. This bet on equality is quite recent, though. Until 2013 only men represented Malta in Strasbourg. A dozen countries rank below the average, Belgium (29%) and Germany (36,5%) among them. Lithuania (9%), Cyprus (17%) and Hungary (19%) are the worst performers.
ONE COMMON TRAIT to almost all nations is the fact that they usually send more women to the European Parliament than they have in their national chambers. Malta is again a case study: only 13% of the MP’s in La Valetta are women, five times less than in Strasbourg, according to IPU’s data. Ireland ranks fourth in Europe (54,4% of Irish representatives in the European chamber are women), but less than one in five MP’s in Dublin are female.