Teaching Comparative

Subliminal issue

In Comparative Politics, gender is an issue that is always just beneath the surface. "Comparativists" don't have a good handle on how to include it their studies and textbook authors don't have good ways to include the topic in their books. I don't have a good way to regularly raise the issue either.

Nonetheless, the question needs to be asked, perhaps especially in a comparative context, "Why, even in regimes and political cultures where voting rights and grassroots participation rates are equal, are women (over 50% of the population almost everywhere) so much less likely to be heads of state, heads of government, high-level officials, and legislators?"

Or, "How do the political cultures of the nation-states in Scandinavia (where women's participation in high levels of government approaches 50%) differ from the other Western European states?"

Maybe this cultural change stuff proceeds at a more glacial pace than we imagine. Perhaps the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society is an important part of the change process.

For Women Who Lead, a Forum of Their Own


Ingrid Betancourt, left, the freed hostage, and Christine Ockrent, of French television, in Deauville, France, last Thursday.

"The annual meeting of the Women’s Forum, which ended here on Saturday and included 1,200 women, is modeled on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the famous global talkathon. The Women’s Forum offered three days of lectures, panels, brainstorming sessions and guided conversations on the issues of the moment: the global economic meltdown, the crisis of leadership, the American presidential election, foreign policy, environmental problems, China, Russia, India. Well-known politicians and speakers, both women and men, came from all over the world, with an emphasis on Europe...

"There were also workshops on specific challenges faced by women, to discuss how women could be most effective in science, politics, education, corporate life and the media...

"And there were sessions that featured prominent women. They included Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian presidential candidate and freed hostage; the designer Diane von Furstenberg; the sailor Ellen MacArthur; the exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin; the venture capitalist Molly F. Ashby; and French cabinet ministers like Fadéla Amara, who is in charge of coordinating plans for the racially mixed and poor Parisian suburbs, and Anne-Marie Idrac, responsible for foreign trade...

"Valérie Bernard, a French businesswoman who lives in Saint-Denis, a poor suburb to the north of Paris, maintains a blog, chroniquesmabanlieue.com. Since the conference began, she wrote, 'it’s been an emotional electric shock.'

"She described it as 'a kind of coaching seminar driven by a single aim, to boost your personal reserve of confidence and tolerance, within a collective dynamic: women in the service of progress.'

"The experience made her nearly speechless, she wrote. 'The intensity of the exchanges, the meetings, the level of the interventions — how can I possibly tell you everything?'"

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Labels: change, gender, political culture, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:17 AM