The Beijing Platform for Action spelled out a set of objectives to be reached by Governments, the international community, non-government organizations, and the private sector to remove the existing obstacles to women(s advancement by the year 2000 (Peterson and Runyan, 1999). It named critical areas which it considered barriers to advancement for women: poverty; education and training; health; violence against women; armed conflict; the economy; power and decision-making; institutional mechanisms for advancement; human rights; the media; and the environment. My thesis is that the only way to bring about these changes is the empowerment of women by getting more women into the political arena to fight for these changes and to place the emphasis on what is needed to bring about full equality between men and women.
Women(s fight for equal fight in politics dates back to the 4th century BC, when women were active in politics, although this was limited to a privileged few (Hamadeh-Banerjee and Oquist, 2000). In more modern times, Condorcet proposed that women be declared eligible for election to governing bodies. However, a short time later, the French Declaration on the Rights of Man negated this right by limiting citizenship on the basis of gender and race (2). The rebirth of democracy in the United States and Great Britain similarly disenfranchised women. It was not really until the First World Conference on Women in 1975, that the international community was forced to assess the inequities that made women second-class citizens in every country, including the industrialized democracies of the western world. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination of Women (CEDAW) has been in force since 1981, and 139 countries, more than two-thirds of the member states of the United Nations, are parties to the treaty. Another 14 have agreed to it in part, yet women are still lagging far behind men in government parti...