Regional programming

Ms. Anna Darska, Head of UNDP Office in Poland who unfortunately couldn’t support the event personally due to mission shared her written address and warmly welcome the round table debate. She emphasized crucial significance of women participation in political arena for the quality of the democracy in Poland and for the quality of the political decisions and their reference to the women’s needs. She called on UNDP commitment to support promotion of full participation of women in the political, economic and social life all around the world especialy within perspective efforts to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals. She shortly introduced achievements of United Nations Development Programme in this respect, e.g. outcomes of “Gender Index” project, to initiate public debate on gender equality of chances in the professional development and at the labour market and preparing tool for organizational assessment in the relation to gender equality of chances. Another introduced outcome - publication „Policy of Gender Equality” offers analysis of women’s and men’s situation in 11 fields of the social life, including “good governance and participation” and formulated proposals and recommendations, benchmarks and good practices. At the end, her address raised the issues of various barriers to women’s political participation and dilemmas faced by women

 

The main presentations on the  Ms. Wendy Harcourt, Coordinator and Managing Editor of the Regional Report on Women and Governance, consultant of UNDP BRC gender team presented development on Report and focused in her presentation on Emerging Themes and Issues in regard to Women’s Political Participation in the EE and CIS. Prof. Małgorzata Fuszara, UNDP Poland Consultant presented the background information on women and Politics in Poland and shared the objective of the RT that she moderated.

 

Ms. Wendy Harcourt in her presentation shared the focus and issues to be analysed in upcoming Report on Women and Government in the EECIS which aims to explore causes for women’s low political participation and propose concrete actions to address them  Comparing RBEC region countries within this time frame she draw attention to most interesting findings such as occurring reduction in women’s political representation across EE CIS region after 1989 during the transition period and slowly increasing their share of political posts during the last decade, especially due to gender quotas and/or influence of acquis communautaire implementation processes in EU accessing countries. At the same time she pointed out to several qualitative aspects of achieving gender equality within political participation that is marked by significant shortcomings e.g. status of women within political decision making positions, prevailing prejudices (in political parties, the media, decision making bodies etc), limits imposed to scope of women’s participation (far from encouraging them to take over leadership roles and positions with significant impact potential). In second part key preliminary findings and open questions in five thematic areas were presented: 1) Political Parties: How to ensure women’s representation in political parties, 2) Legislation: Acquiring and implementing gender equity Legislation; 3) Going Beyond the Numbers : Towards a 50/50 share of political economic and social power; 4) An Enabling Environment: Building support for women’s rights and gender equality and empowerment; 5) Civil Society working at local, national and regional level for women’s political participation.

 

Prof. Małgorzata Fuszara concentrated in her presentation on overview of development and current situation of participation of women in polish national parliament (lower and upper house), and among deputies in European Parliamnet. At EU level women consist only of 14,8% among Polish deputies regarding European Parliament. Percentage of women in national parliament has raised from from 1989 - 13% up to 20% in 2007. However, while in upper house than consists of senators, there has been interesting momentum of increased participation of women in 2001 (reaching 23 %) in recent years it decreased to 8% (2007) making Poland the only country in Europe where the participation of women in the Upper House has significanlty reduced during last 10 years. In second part, prof. Fuszara focused on barriers for women to become Parlamentarian and barries to Women’s Interests Representation. Antoher issue was also the impact of cooperation between Women’s Organisations.