Number of women lawmakers 'appalling', says Projek Sama

An institutional reforms advocacy group has urged the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry to table a white paper to end the nation’s “appalling” under-representation of women in the political arena.

According to a survey by the International Parliamentary Union (IPU), Project - Stability and Accountability for Malaysia (Projek Sama), Malaysia is ranked 150 amongst 190 countries for women’s representation in the Parliament.

Projek Sama then pointed out that only 30 (13.51 percent) out of 222 lawmakers are women.

“Phrased alternatively, we have less than one woman for every seven MPs.

“The situation is worse at the state level, with only 12.17 percent of elected state assemblypersons being women, or less than one woman for every eight assemblypersons.

“Across the 13 state legislatures, this percentage ranges from 3.13 percent (Terengganu) to 26.79 percent (Johor),” it said in a statement yesterday.

The group then called on Women, Family and Community Development Minister Nancy Shukri to commit to producing the said white paper as the under-representation of women cannot be treated as normal or business as usual.

It pointed out that the Penang government led by Chow Kon Yeow had presented a white paper to introduce Top-up Women-Only Additional Seats (TWOAS), as a structural remedy to address the under-representation of women in elections and legislatures due to the single-member nature of the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system.

Although the project was blocked by an “intra-party power struggle”, Projek Sama said the Penang white paper is still relevant for debate and the ministry can use it as an entry point to resume discussion.

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“We also expect the parliamentary special select committee on Women, Children and Social Development, consisting of (Puchong MP) Yeo Bee Yin as the chair and eight other MPs to pursue this matter as a committee and also in parliamentary debates in this sitting that would last till March 27.

“While the call for a minimum of 30 percent women representation had been made since the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, little progress had been made in Malaysia.

“In fact, when the IPU first compiled the data on the percentage of women parliamentarians in January 1997, Malaysia then ranked 60th with 15 (7.8 percent) out of 192 parliamentarians being women,” it said.

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