Women Representation In Parliaments
For years, perhaps centuries, women across different generations have been fighting for equality and for the rights of women all over the world.
Over the past few years, there’s been a noticeable, but not good enough increase in women representation across different sectors, and politics/government is not excluded.
This dataset contains statistics from different countries on how women have been represented in the Parliaments of these countries.
The dataset was gotten from the European Commission, is being used by the European Union to monitor the Sustainable Development Goal 5 of Gender Equality, was visualized with the Tableau software and can be viewed here.
The image above is the visualization of the entire dataset, showing how women are represented in the government of each country over the years.
Without any atom of doubt, this visualization shows that Sweden is leading the way when it comes to having women in government as the country has had women in government every year since 2003.
Sweden is regarded as a progressive country in terms of gender equality and a forerunner for women’s rights and according to Wikipedia, feminism in Sweden goes as far back as the 17th century, and this could be the reason why Sweden is so far ahead in terms of gender equality. Worthy of note is the fact that this has only progressively evolved, therefore allowing women to exercise their rights even more.
Another probable reason for this is because in Nordic countries, which Sweden is one, women believe that their representation or presence in government makes a huge difference and so women participating in politics is a norm.
The inclusion of women in the Swedish parliament started from about 1970, hence it is no surprise that Sweden leads other countries in this dataset.
Over the years, there has been an increase in the representation of women in the parliaments of the countries used for this dataset. 2019 being the latest year, is also the peak, where we have an average of 29.7% of parliaments have women representation. Considering the fact that more women are now rising up in politics and their voices being heard, it is expected that as the years go by, there will be more women in politics.
The visualization above shows the top 5 countries, i.e Countries that have had women representation since 2003 and have the highest percentage.
4 out of these 5 countries are members of the EU. The only country that is not a member of the EU is Norway, however, Norway is a Nordic country.
Norway’s presence amongst the top 5 countries, shows that there is indeed some form of enlightenment or ideology that is peculiar to the Nordic countries.
Having shown that mostly member countries of the EU had women representation early on, it is therefore no surprise to see that the 3 countries that did not have women in government until very recently are not members of the EU. These three countries did not have women in their parliaments until 2018, and our data ends at 2019, hence the visualization above.
Kosovo is a relatively new country as the country just gained independence in 2008 and is still unrecognized by some countries. While women in Kosovo relatively have the same rights as the men, in that there is minimal gender inequality, the country is still trying to find its feet as the international community is divided on the acceptance of the country.
In Albania, there is a huge gap of gender inequality, such that women’s rights are stifled in the country and they are paid much less.
In Bosnia, there is a deep seated gender inequality that has roots in the country’s constitution, such that women in politics face violence/abuse.
I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Feel free to drop a comment or connect with me via Twitter , or you can check out my Github page for some cool projects.
Resources
https://borgenproject.org/womens-rights-in-albania/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_liberation_movement_in_Europe
