BALLOT News X Issue No. 2 September 2007 ELECTORAL SYSTEMS should ensure WOMEN GET FAIR REPRESENTATION By Jealousy Mawarire F undamental to understanding the repression, exclusion and general oppression of women is the need to understand how systems the world over, political, social and economic, have contributed to the subjugation of women. And any form of movement, feminist or otherwise, that seeks to fully subvert the subservient position that women find themselves in, has to initially deal with the idea of grounding understanding of this oppression in theory and practice. It is in light of this that electoral systems have to be choreographed in a manner that ensures women get fair representation. A lot has been said about how electoral systems have benefited the incumbents. Other works have also cited how opposition political players and ethnic and racial minorities have been sidelined from government and parliamentary participation by electoral systems that ensure the dictatorship of the winners. Sadly, very little has been said about how all the electoral systems, Majority Plurality Systems, Proportional Representation and Semi Proportional Systems have ensured men remain the dominant political players in any system of governance that stem out of an election process. It is pertinent to outline here that every form of political, economic and social practice that is meant to perpetuate male domination is proffered apparently in gender-neutral ways that only critical inquiry can expose. Women should also get a fair representation Democratic constitutions, as Thenjiwe Mtintso, Deputy Secretary General of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa noted, just give the general direction which democratic trajectories take, but do not get into the fundamentals of how the oppression of women can be eradicated. She argues that “Democratic constitutions deliver formal, but not substantive equality” and that “a conscious development of theory is critical to help us understand the workings of patriarchy, its character and form in our countries as it exists in and interacts with other oppressive forms such as racism and capitalism.” Mtintso further notes that “Indigenous approaches, informed by other experiences but based on our concrete situation should be applied” to our approaches to ensuring gender equality and these could take the form of re-orienting existing electoral practices to ensure they conform to the objective of bring about gender parity. 9 It is interesting to note that, hitherto, efforts to address the exclusion of women from the political playground have always been mooted as stop gap measures to quell the ever-rising voices of women calling for political recognition and equality yet circumventing the real patriarchal nature of most political systems that have ensured women are always subjugated. Piecemeal changes to electoral processes in line with the 30 percent quota suggested by the 1997 Southern African Development Community (SADC) declaration on gender development are some of the measures put in place as safety nets to contain calls for true proportional representation of women in politics- PROPORTIONAL in the sense of women being allocated seats in line with the percentage female votes cast. It is therefore, critical that every existing electoral system be examined with gendered lenses. Continued on page 11 X