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From the roundtable Gender policies in the context of the forthcoming elections and EU membership

The roundtable entitled Gender policies in the context of the forthcoming elections and EU membership, organized by the Center for Women’s Studies, was held in Novinarski dom on October 25, 2011.

The roundtable was part of the project AD ACTE – Anti-Discrimination ACtions Towards Equality of women and men, which the Center is implementing in partnership with the CEE Network for Gender Issues from Slovenia and in collaboration with the Serbian National Council, with financial support from the EU.

After an introduction from Rada Borić, executive director of the Center for Women’s Studies, the main topic of discussion was the representation of gender policies in pre-election programs, along with gender policy experiences of the EU member countries. Sonja Lokar, president of the CEE Network, shared her Slovenian experiences, and Astrid Thors, Swedish People’s Party representative in the Finnish Parliament, and also a longtime European Parliament representative and until recently the Minister of Migration and European Affairs in the Finnish government, spoke of the necessity of transpartisan cooperation between women politicians. Josip Šipić from the Economic Institute in Zagreb spoke about the right-wing parties’ politics of motherhood, and Tatjana Broz from the NGO CESI offered a gender analysis of the pre-election political parties’ programs. Political party representatives Ana Lovrin, president of the Justice Committee of the Croatian Parliament’s and Gordana Sobol, president of the Gender Equality Committee of the Croatian Parliament, spoke about the representation of gender policies in their parties’ programs. The event was moderated by Marjeta Šinko, an assistant at the Faculty of Political Science and a member of the Center for Women’s Studies.

Great expectations

In an interview for the website Libela, the Ombudswoman for Gender Equality Višnja Ljubičić commented on the record low number of women in Parliament in the last 10 years and on the quota system regulated by the Gender Equality Act:

In the last parliamentary elections once again no attention was paid to the legal provisions on the percentage of women (at least 40%) on electoral lists. The Gender Equality Act, passed in 2008, had given the parties three election cycles to adapt, which means that the punitive measures will ensue in the following local elections. Do you think this is a good solution and how would you comment on the fact that women occupy only 20% of parliamentary seats?

The practice of the EU is to provide a minimum of three election cycles in order to see the effect of introducing political quotas. A European research has shown that it takes 15 to 20 years for quotas to take hold. The expectations from this law were great and we thought that the proportion of women in Parliament would grow, not fall, as was the case after the last election. Some parties did include 30 or 40% of women on their lists, but they were ranked low, so it was apparent that they would not get into Parliament.

When misdemeanor provisions start being applied, I would not like to see parties rather pay fines than include women in higher positions, as some French parties do. The introduction of quotas is a good thing and I believe it will take hold, but we will not succeed if we are only going to repressively penalize parties. It is more important to work on raising awareness in society and providing equal opportunities for women to be active in both politics and business. And that is not possible as long as women have to work the double shift – at work and at home.

Parliament adopts Declaration on Croatia’s EU membership

With only one vote “against” (Ruža Tomašić) and 127 votes “for”, the Parliament has adopted the Declaration on Croatia’s membership in the European Union, a document that invites all citizens to go to the referendum on Sunday, January 22, but which also confirms that Croatia’s accession to the EU on July 1, 2013, presents a strategic national interest. During the all-day discussion, the representatives invited the citizens to vote at the referendum on Sunday. And while most of the representatives spoke about the advantages of the EU and reasons for voting “yes”, the representatives of HDSSB and the Labour Party once again pointed out the importance of postponing the referendum and allowing citizens the right to be better informed. Parts of the discussion can be read at Vecernji.hr.

New book / Gender Equality and Discrimination in Croatia

The Office for Gender Equality has published a collection of papers entitled Gender Equality and Discrimination in Croatia, edited by Željka Kamenov and Branka Galić, based on the research “Perceptions, Experiences and Attitudes about Gender Discrimination in the Republic of Croatia.” It is important to emphasize that this is the first scientific research on gender discrimination in Croatia conducted on the national level. It was carried out in 2009 by researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Political Science and the Institute for Social Research. The author of the part of the research concerning the political participation of women, or the discrimination of women in politics, is a Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, Smiljana Leinert Novosel, Ph.D.