No women?

The Region

No women? that’s poor

By David North

THE Pacific Islands fared poorly in a survey of the parliaments of the world because of a scarcity of women members. Five of the 12 nations covered wound up at the very bottom of the list with either no women in parlia ment or, in the case of Nauru, no data on the subject. (See Chart).

The survey was released by one of the world’s oldest inter-governmental

organisations, the Inter-Parliamentary

Union (IPU) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The release date was timed to coincide with the world women’s conference in Beijing the past month. In a survey of 176 countries IPU found that, on aver age, about one member out of 10 in the world’s legislatures was a woman. None of the independent nations of the Pacific was at or above this average.

Tuvalu, with 7.7 per cent of the membership of the Palamene (the par liament) being female, came in first among the island nations. (The percent-

Women In Parliament

age suggests one woman in a 3 3-mem

ber legislative body. Maybe IPU’s math

ematicians gave Tuvalu too small a per centage. Other Pacific nations with one or more women in the parliament included Fiji (3, now 2), Western Samoa (2), Tonga, the Marshalls, Vanuatu, and the Solomons (one each). Kiribati, FSM, Palau and PNG, reported IPU, had no women in their legislatures.

The IPU survey results shown here deal with either the only legislative body, or, if there are two of them, with the more powerful lower branch. The survey also did not cover any of the island jurisdiction (other than the Associated States) that relate to France, New Zealand or the US. Nor, for that matter, to Pitcairn.

The Pacific would have done much better in the parliamentary survey had some of these islands been included, notably Guam, which traditionally has a good share of women in the Territorial Senate. At the moment there are six women in this 21-member body, and the presiding officer is Madeleine Z.

Bordallo, Guam’s elected Lieutenant Governor. There have been seven or eight women in that body in most of the recent legislatures.

The nearby Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands has two women in its 18-member House of Representatives, both elected from Saipan. There is, however, only one woman in the 20-member lower house in American Samoa. No women have ever served in the upper house in Pago Pago, as the only voters are the village chiefs, who are usually men.

Were the women of American Samoa to take this voting practice into a feder al court it would probably not survive the experience but no one has filed such a suit. Western Samoa also used to have a system of matai (chiefly) voting, but dropped it a couple of years ago.

The listing system used by IPU was, if anything, generous to nations at the bottom of the list. Had the numerous statistical ties been handled differently those at the bottom of the chart would have been shown to be in the 160th place, not 105th and 106th. A

Fiji’s Parliament: not enough women?

Asaeli Lave

Chountry

Surveyed

% of Women Rank in World Sweden 40.4 I Guam 28.6 not listed NZ 21.2 14 Marianas 11.1 not listed

Usa

10.9 43 Tuvalu 7.7 58 A. Samoa 5.0 not listed

Fiji

4.3 77 W. Samoa 4.3 79 Tonga 3.3 87 Marshalls 3.0 89 Vanuatu 2.2 95 Solomons 2.1 96 Kiribati 0 105 Micronesia 0 105 Palau 0 105

Png

0 105 Nauru no data 106