Drude Dahlerup, Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, has for several years studied gender quotas within politics. She has, for example, emphasized that the Nordic countries are no longer the best in the world when it comes to levels of female representation in politics, and that many countries have not wanted to take the long way to equality as the Nordic countries have done. Instead, they have introduced legally regulated quotas.
In the European research project FEMCIT, on the significance of women’s movements for the citizenship of women, she has explored the relationship between gender quotas and ethnicity. The research project involves Sweden, Poland, Great Britain, Spain and Bosnia. Drude Dahlerup presented her research at a seminar in Oslo on 5 November, where several of the Nordic researchers in FEMCIT also participated.
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| Drude Dahlerup. Photo: Bosse Parbring |
“The quota debate concerns women, but in the minority debate women are often excluded”, Drude Dahlerup points out. Thus minority women are made invisible.
According to Drude Dahlerup, there are two different views when it comes to using quotas as a political strategy. The first is that gender equality will appear automatically, step by step, when women are sufficiently qualified. In that case, quotas are not considered an option.
The second viewpoint is what she calls the fast track. In this view, under-representation is not regarded as something caused by the lack of qualifications, but by discriminating structures. Quotas are a remedy to that situation.
In the countries that the researchers have studied, it is more common that the political parties discuss minority quotas than quotas for women. But organisations for women with a minority background are more interested in gender quotas than in minority quotas. They think that they do not necessarily need a woman with the same ethnicity to represent them.
Line Nyhagen-Predelli at Loughborough University in Great Britain studies minority women in and outside of the women’s movement. Together with other researchers she has particularly analysed the situation in Norway, Spain and Great Britain.
She says that women with a minority background are still marked out by the women’s movement. Representatives for the women’s movement find that women with a minority background have their own interests, which separate them from ‘Norwegian’ women. A point of criticism is that the women prefer to organise themselves based on ethnicity rather than on gender.
However, there is potential in cooperating on certain strategic issues, such as men’s violence against women.
“But majority women must reflect over their own whiteness and position”, Line Nyhagen-Predelli emphasizes.
