Political blindness as it is …

Recently, “Public Journalism Club” NGO has conducted an online survey on “Women’s Involvement in Government” on Facebook. The results were presented during a discussion on “Women in the New Government and Political Processes” held at Media Center yesterday.

The question is, “How do you evaluate the degree of involvement of women in the newly formed government?” Possible responses were insufficient, sufficient, more than enough. As a result of the survey, an interesting image has been recorded.

According to Derenik Malkhasyan, 2560 Facebook users visited the survey site, but 34% or 870 users answered the questions. 47% of them or 408 respondents said that it was insufficient, , and 53% assessed enough and more than enough. In particular, 31% considered satisfactory, 22% more than enough. In other words, the majority of the respondents consider low representation of women as normal.

It should be noted that the results are in fact worrying, as almost all sociological surveys in the republic have shown that public opinion on women’s representation at the decision-making level is more advanced  than the reality or positions of political forces.

Facebook requests do not satisfy sociological requirements and in this respect the above-mentioned  question cannot be considered as of representative nature, but especially on the wave of revolution, it was expected that the Facebook audience would be more advanced than the whole society. Why these expectations are not met it is hard to say, but perhaps it should be taken into account that the Facebook community at this moment has a unique attitude towards the new government and is not ready to approach it critically.

Human rights defender Zara Hovhannisyan, referring to the results of the survey, expressed an opinion that the inertia situation continues, as a very clear message was not voiced, and the window that seemed to be active due to the active participation of women in the revolutionary rallies and after the prime minister’s announcement in parliament remains half open. There was no willingness to revolutionize the notion of women’s role.

Another participant of the discussion Arman Gharibyan expressed conviction that in this issue the government should play the role of a pioneer, taking into account the international experience.

Full text in Armenian