The number of women candidates in the national lists is 32.4%. progress or regress? 21.11.2018

The Central Electoral Commission has published the national and regional lists of 11 political forces participating in the extraordinary parliamentary elections to be held on December 9^th.

The average number of women candidates included in the national electoral rolls is 32.4%. This is more than 29.5% of the women registered in the 2017 elections, with 36.2% of women representing the Yerevan Council of Elderly elections. Let us remind that according to the current legislation, every fourth or 25% of the party lists should be women.

The number of female candidates exceeds the male candidates only in one of the parties’ lists “National Progress”.

The representation of women candidates is higher than 40 percent only  in the Citizen’s Decision Social Democratic Party’s electoral list –  of the 81 candidates, 35 or 43.2% are women.

It should be noted that, as in the case of extraordinary elections of the Yerevan Council of Elders, in this case, considering the representation of women candidates in the lists of 11 political forces in the context of improving the gender quotas, one can state that the concerns about women’s potential are exaggerated.

Most political forces have shown goodwill in terms of involvement of women and represented average 32.4% women candidates. This is more than the 25% quota set out in the current Electoral Code and 30% proposed by the draft amendments to the National Assembly. As a matter of fact, 30% can be considered as a passing stage for parties, which is an important argument for increasing the gender quota for lists up to 40%.