You're reading: Election gender quotas are not working in Ukraine so far, experts say

The upcoming Oct. 25 local elections would be the first one with a minimum target set for female candidates proposed by each party.

To make
gender-balanced party lists, the new law on local elections introduced a gender
quota for candidates, providing that no less than 30 percent of female
candidates are to participate in elections.

However,
it’s not a mandatory one, as the law didn’t provide sanctions for parties for
not fulfilling the quota.

The law
also didn’t suggest what the party should do if it has only one or two
candidates on its list.

Olena
Zakharova, an expert with the International Center for Policy Studies, believes
the new law is a progress for Ukrainian parliament, however, it was not
effective in terms of new complex voting procedure.

“Even if a
(female) candidate wins in her district, it won’t guarantee her a seat in a
local council, because all depends on the party she’s running with,” Zakharova
told the Kyiv Post. “Besides, the parties haven’t been doing a complex work on
their structures and now they just need to have these quotas fulfilled.”

However,
most of the parties stick to the law, observers say. There’re some 5,545
females or 32.1 percent of 17, 278 registered candidates running for city and
oblast councils. The most active female candidates were in Odesa, Zhytomyr,
Rivne, Mykolaiv, Poltava and Lutsk, according to the Committee of Voters of
Ukraine, a nationwide election watchdog.

Meanwhile,
only 57 women or 14.7 percent are running for mayors in Kyiv and other big
cities with the population more than 90,000 citizens. Most of those are
self-nominated candidates.

The female
candidates often have less chance to be promoted at the same level as their
male colleagues during the election campaign, observers said.

Less than
one in five parliamentarians across the world are women. Legal or voluntary
electoral gender quotas are used in more than half countries across the world
to boost women’s political representation.

But the
positive changes already happened, according to Zakharova.

Ukraine’s
parliament has the greatest number of women the country has ever had. There are
47 women, or 11 percent of the total seats. In 2012, only 43 female lawmakers
made it to parliament. For instance, there are some 110 women, or 24 percent in
460-seat Polish Sejm.

Zakharova
believes it will be a “good platform for the future parliamentary elections,”
as the parties may see how the gender quotas will work.

“The
parliament also has prepared two draft laws that will set up stricter sanctions
for violation gender quotas and will clarify the position of candidates in the
lists by gender,” Zakharova says. “So far, we see that women take part in the
elections, but not that often as they would want to. (It is) also because of
financial reasons.”

According
to Andriy Mahera, deputy head of Central Election Commission, the violation of
gender quotas doesn’t add to the “democratic election process.”

“If the
parliament has passed the law, none of its norms should be declarative in
nature,” Mahera said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be
reached at
[email protected].