Gender and political equality

Susan Moller Okin

pp. 73-91

in: Herlinde Pauer Studer (ed), Norms, values, and society, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

This paper is about the political representation of women in liberal-democratic societies. This is not because I think issues of gender and political equality are any less serious in other types of regime; in many cases they are more serious, because women are more oppressed. But the issue of how women might achieve political power in states where it is not in any way widely shared even amongst men are very different, and cannot readily be discussed in the same breath as the same issue in more democratic contexts. The countries I am concerned with here, then, satisfy three criteria: all adult citizens have the right to vote, elections are held on a regular basis (or, in the case of the many new democracies, where only one election may have been held, this is the intention), and there are at least two political parties competing for office. This is in many ways a fairly minimal definition of a democracy, as some of what I will say will testify to.