INTRODUCTION
One of the primary functions of a government is to promote law and order (ushistory.org, 2002). Furthermore, governments provide their constituents with social services, among others (Guardian, 2021). To do this, a government, in addition to other branches or division, usually has a legislative branch, which is primarily in charge with creating and maintaining legislation, laws, and policies.
Intuitively, for the legislative body to create policies that are inclusive and reflective of its constituents needs and desires, the body itself must also be representative of its constituents. In fact, according to FairVote (n.d.), legislatures themselves should "reflect the diversity of the constituents they represent" (par. 1). From these, it is important to ensure proper representation. Now, one aspect of this is ensuring women's representation in legislation.
This article will examine various aspects of women's representation in the legislature of countries, such as how women are represented in the legislature and possible associations between women representation and policy-making.
METHODS
Global development panel data on various indicators and country-level (as well as region-level and bracket-level) characteristics were obtained from the World Bank Open Data and served as the data sources for visualizations and analyses.
​
The datasets were wrangled and cleaned using Python and further refinements were done with the help of MS Excel.
​
Then, the transformed datasets were utilized as inputs in Tableau (Public) to create visualizations, which were then used to gather insights and determine possible associations.
KEY POINTS AND INSIGHTS
This section contains visualizations of the global development panel data obtained, as well as several insights that can be drawn from them. All visualizations are interactable, so feel free to tinker around and possibly get new insights!
01
Low representation of women in legislation
Observe that for almost all countries, the proportion of legislative seats held by women is considerably lower than the proportion of women in the total population. For nearly every country, the percentage of women in its total population is about 50%, but only a handful of countries have at least half of their parliament seats held by women.
​
Although, in general, women representation in legislative seats are slowly increasing over time. Notably, countries with smaller populations have generally higher rates of increase of women representation in legislation than those with larger populations. The smaller percentage changes in larger countries may be due to the larger denominators (i.e., larger total population).
02
Concentrations of inequitable representation
One simple reasonable assumption of what the ideal condition is the equality between the proportion of women in the total population and the proportion of legislative seats (i.e., equitable representation via proportional representation). In the visualization, the lower the deviation is, the closer are the two proportion to each other for the corresponding country (i.e., close to the assumed equitable condition).
​
Observe that deviations from the assumed ideal condition generally decrease over time across countries. However, there are still considerable inequitable representations in the status quo. Particularly, relatively high degrees of inequitable representation can be observed in the EMEA region.
​
The Philippines is somewhere around the middle of the pack when it comes to degree of equitable representation of women in legislation.
03
Women representation and education
According to Chaurasia (2022), one key to increasing political participation among women lies in improving the educational attainment of the youth. Furthermore, it has been noted in the same article that female politicians generally have higher literacy rate than men. In a political climate that has higher educational expectations for women to hold higher positions, the authors explored how the female legislators have prioritized education in one aspect that they can control: government expenditure.
​
It can be observed with the data above:
-
The Philippines with 30% women in legislation allocate 17% of government budget on education.
-
Bigger countries like India and China with relatively fewer female legislators allocate even less of their public spending on education.
-
However, it should be noted that there is no strong relationship between the number of women in legislation and the prioritization of the national governments towards educational expenditure.
-
Even as women political participation has increased over time, the budgetary allocation for education has remained inconsistent at most.
04
Women representation and health
As women leaders across the globe gained recognition with their swift response and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in contrast to their male counterparts, the authors explored how this has extended to their national governments' outlook on public health.
​
It can be observed throughout the years, that as female participation in legislation increases, there is an upward trend in allocation of budget on health.
While there is still a significant problem issue in gender disparity in political participation of women across the globe, there is a need for better data to support how increased participation of female politicians affect certain functions of the government. Given the data collected by the authors, it can be at least concluded that there is an urgent need for more equitable representation of women especially in large countries like India and China with populations of over a billion each. Even for the native country of the authors, the Philippines, there are rooms for improvement as only 30% of our congress is female and the country has only had two female presidents out of fifteen in the country’s long history. However, the presenters remain optimistic with the future of women empowerment in leadership as the trends suggest that countries around the world continue to have increasing percentage of women in high government positions.
CONCLUSION
REMARKS
Note that the insights and analyses done here are meant for descriptive and exploratory purposes only. No kind of statistical inference, whether correlational, causal, or any other kind of statistical inference, is made.
​
This article can serve as motivation and basis for future studies and analyses based on inferential, confirmatory, or other kinds of procedures and set-ups.