UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : IPU Press conference: Launch of the IPU Women in Parliament Report

Good afternoon, dear colleagues.

Thank you very much for being here, either in person or online.

I know you've had a very, a very busy morning with the briefing.

Let me just turn this down.

Welcome to the Inter Parliamentary Union, to the IPU press conference.

Very happy to be here to tell you about our latest report, Women in Parliament based on elections and nominations in 2023.

There is a press release that you should have received this morning in 4 languages.

The embargo is at 2 o'clock, 2:00 PM.

And I'm very happy to be joined by the IPU Secretary General, Martin Chung Gong, backed up by Mariana Duarte Mutzenberg, who is an expert in our gender programme.

Without further ado, I will pass give the floor to the IPU Secretary General.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Thomas.

It gives me great pleasure to come to you again, as I do every year to present to you the report on women in Parliament.

That is the representation of women in Parliament globally.

And this year we are reporting on the 2023 developments.

And let me start by announcing that in 2023 we did witness an increase in women's representation in parliament.

And today women account for 26.9% of global parliamentary membership.

These percentages based on the elections and renewals that took place in some 63 chambers and 52 countries in 2020.

Third, if we compare this data with previous data, we'll see that the rate of growth in 2023 is the same as in 2022.

But if you go farther back, you'll see that we have actually reduced when it comes to the Women in Parliament representation.

For instance, in 2020 and 2021, we were talking of a percentage, a great growth rate of 0.6%.

So we witnessed A reduction this year, which stands at 0.4 percentage points.

But let me say that there are some bright spots.

Although we can say that woman's political representation is more or less stagnant, there are some bright spots that show in particular that where there is the way, there is the way, the will there is the way.

And we once again have witnessed that when we have institutional mechanisms such as well legislated quotas, the end result is almost always an increase in women's representation.

Looking at the statistics for 2023, we actually did see that those countries that implemented quotas in the elections or renewals increase showed an increase that was more substantial than for the countries that had no quarters in place.

So I think that we can continue to advocate for the institutional introduction of quarters worldwide if we want to be more progressive in terms of women's political representation, especially in Parliament.

Another thing that I want to signal here as a bright spot is that some regions continue to be the leading light in women's representation in Parliament and we do see that the Americans continue to be top on the league table when it comes to women's representation in Parliament.

We see that women in this region account for 35.1% of global parliamentary membership.

We also see that in 2023, sub-Saharan Africa has made substantial improvements in its representation of women in parliament, where we saw an increase of 3.9 percentage points as compared to the previous year.

There, we saw substantial, very substantial gains in a number of countries such as Benin, Estratini, Sierra Leone.

I must point out that in Sierra Leone there was a quota that was introduced in 2023 which led to that the substantial increase in women's representation in parliament.

We also note again and this conference what I've just said about the Americans, that when you look at the league table, the top ten countries when it comes to women's parliamentary representation, five of those top 10 come from Latin America.

You have Cuba and Nicaragua, where you have 55.7% and 53.9% respectively.

We have Mexico and Bolivia that are also scoring very well at that level.

We do have of course, and I I mentioned that Rwanda continues to be top of the league table with 61.3% of parliamentary membership made-up of women.

And of course we have in the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region, we have the United Arab Emirates that maintained its parity in terms of men and women's representation in parliament.

We can also point out that one country in the entrenched democracies, New Zealand, dropped from the rankings slightly, but they were replaced by another country, Andorra.

When it comes to women's representation parity globally, we can also report on this is good news that there has been a slight increase in the percentage of women holding top political leadership position in parliaments, where now 23.8% of parliaments worldwide are led by women.

And this is this represents a 1.1 percentage points increase in the world.

We want to signal 2 fests in Cambodia and Cote d'Ivoire which for the first time elected female speakers of parliament.

This is something that we need to celebrate.

Let me say a few words about the not so bright spots, actually the negative things.

And the first I want to mention is the growing trend of women politicians quitting politics altogether.

And this has been as a result of the very adversarial environment in which they are operating women.

And we do have statistics to that effect.

Women bear the brunt of hate speech, especially on account of their participation in political life.

And we see a disturbing increase in online harassment targeting women politicians.

You will remember that the then New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda.

Jacinda Adam did step down from her prime ministerial role.

She subsequently stepped down from parliament all together.

Similarly, Marina, I think Sana Sana Marine of Finland, also not only was beaten in the elections last year, but also decided not to run for political office anymore, citing, of course, the very difficult environment in which she was operating.

And many of them too, did say that they didn't have the hat to continue in politics and they cited burnout as a major factor in their decision.

So we see that the political space continues to be hostile to women politicians in particular in parliament singularly.

But the good news there is that many countries, many parliaments are aware, increasingly aware of this phenomenon and its negative impact on inclusive political participation.

I'm not taking steps to address the issue to create a safe environment for women in in parliaments.

And that is why you have countries such as Australia, Benin, Iceland, Ireland and Thailand.

That using the tools that the IPO has developed the guidelines for elimination of Sexism, Harassment and Violence against Women in Parliament, That using this tool to put in place mechanisms that ensure a safe space for women in parliament.

We do want to therefore launch an appeal for more robust action by other parliaments to address this phenomenon, which is not very good for democracy in in the world today.

When we look at the elections or renewals that took place in 2023, we also see that there was a lot of backlash when it comes to women's rights and this occupied centre stage in many of the campaigns that took place last year.

When we look at Poland, there, you saw that the court, the Supreme Court of Poland, did actually uphold the ruling restricting access to abortion for women.

And this is something that was supported by the government of the day.

And we are told that this particular factor led to the downfall of that government.

And so we do push back on women's rights at our own risk and peril.

On the other hand, we saw in Argentina the then presidential candidate was subsequently elected, Javier Miley, who actually promised to rollback progressive laws in terms of women's rights.

He was subsequently elected and we do understand that he did score very handsomely in the male electorate.

So we have a thing to be very sanguine about women's political participation.

There is progress, but there's a lot of pushback that we we need to address in a robust manner.

The good news also here is that in France, just next door here, the lawmakers did actually vote to enshrine in the constitution women's right to abortion.

I think that this is something that we need to hail in terms of promoting women's rights.

So generally I I think that this is where we stand when it comes to women's parliamentary representation worldwide.

And as I have said, the we have a mixed picture.

We have progress, but progress that is not proceeding as we would hope.

I think it will take us much more time to reach gender equality, gender parity, if we continued at this rate.

We also want to point out that the number of factors that hinder or hamper women's representation that we need to address.

And of course, the general message that I want to convey is that we have to be vigilant if we need to protect democracy, democracy that is inclusive and participatory, democracy that includes women and men on an equal footing.

This is something that is not a given looking at the developments around the world currently.

So I just want us to pay particular attention to that, and we do think that it is within the powers of parliaments as legislators to do something about this, including introducing some institutional mechanisms such as quarters, reserve seats for women that could help level the playing field for women in the political arena.

I think I will stop at this juncture and maybe fill the number of questions if there are any.

Thank you very much, Secretary General.

So to the people in the room, Benjamin, thank you.

So I will ask my questions in French, if that's OK with you both.

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Thank you very much.

I see that there's quite a few people quite a few journalists online.

If there are any questions online, now is a good time.

None from the room.

Yes, I see a question from Maya the UN brief.

Yes.

Thank you very much for taking my question.

My question is regarding you were just mentioning Secretary General, the use of AI and can you expand a little bit more on how IPU is using it in its own organisation and what you see is how it is, its impact also in legislatures throughout the world.

If you have some points or data that you can share with us.

You know, the first time we carried out a survey globally of this phenomenon of sexism and harassment in Parliament was in 2016.

And it was very clear from the interviews that we had conducted that at least 76% of women parliamentarians had come in for some from some form of sexual harassment or sexism or sexual ******* on account of their being involved in politics.

And most often this was perpetrated by the main, the male colleagues.

But increasingly too, we have seen evidence that online harassment has become very pervasive.

I have had the opportunity of meeting with women parliamentarians from what we call the entrenched democracies, like, for instance, in Canada, who told me clearly that they had considered stepping down from Parliament because of the amount of harassment that they had.

Experienced but let me also say that this is not a phenomenon that is limited to the entrenched democracies.

It's a worldwide phenomenon because we've gone ahead and done regional studies and they all we do have the same statistics regarding woman's well, the victimisation of women on account of their participation in in political life.

So it is for real.

And this has the potential to impact on the effectiveness of parliaments where, for instance, women, first of all, may not be as representative as they were they would be in Parliament.

But those who are in Parliament themselves may not be able and be courageous enough to participate in a more robust manner in the deliberations of Parliament because this fear for their lives, they have been a death ******, threats issued against women.

They fear for their family, their close families.

And as I mentioned earlier on in this press conference, you did see evidence of senior political leaders quitting politics all together as a result of what they call burnout.

But on the line this burnout is the hostile environment in which this female leaders are.

So it's a serious problem that is well documented, including within the IPU.

And we at the IPU are encouraging parliaments as legislators to take steps to address the issue so that they can create a safe environment for women.

We do not think that this is part of the powers of Parliament.

They do have all the powers enshrined in their constitution to make laws, to make policies that address this issue, to put in place the resources that are required to work to help address violence against women in politics in in general.

And I did mention that we have even gone ahead and produced tools that parliaments can use.

We have the guidelines for eliminating sexism, sexual harassment and other forms of sexual ******* on women that many parliaments are using today, and we do encourage them to do that.

My colleagues and I, we always offer our services to help parliaments around the world address this issue in a very substantive and substantial fashion.

Thank you, Secretary General Marianne, I don't know if you want to add anything, perhaps on the work Violence against women forthcoming reports.

Sure.

As the Secretary General mentioned, IP US work on this topic has not started yesterday.

Of course today we we have new forms as that we're discussing on AI.

So back in 2016 we did the first global study that showed no percentage of women in office.

That's appalling.

Over 80% face some form of the psychological violence, threats, intimidation online, in person and we pursued that through regional studies.

So we did one in the Council of Europe regions or the large Europe region in 20, 18/20/21.

We did the same in Africa and now we've embarked on a new one in Asia.

So we continue to document and we see similar rates everywhere in the world.

Thank you.

Marianna.

May I have a follow up?

May I, I, I see your hand up.

Did you have a follow up or or is it did you do?

Yes.

I have your.

I'm sorry I.

Clicked yes.

Thank you very much for taking my question.

It's a follow up is do you have data also on Parliament addressing AI harms?

How do you, are you tabulating in some way or form the way they are addressing the issues?

Because I know in some countries that it's already in, in the, in their agendas, right.

How how to address the question of AI harms in in both in women's issues as well as other issues in terms of discrimination, racial discrimination, job discrimination, discriminations in the workplace?

Yeah, thank you very much.

We our approach to AI is 2 pronged.

First of all, we look at how AI has the potential to improve upon the deliberations of parliaments worldwide and this is something that we are tracking on a regular basis through the IPU Centre for Innovation in in Parliaments.

That's the good side of it.

But also we are sanguine enough to note that as a new phenomenon, artificial intelligence is fraught with a lot of uncertainties and we are beginning to see it's negative impact on democracy as a whole.

And that is why the IPU has embarked on a year long process of reflection on the good and the bad sides of artificial intelligence and their possible impact on democracy as a whole.

So by come October 2024, we will have a global parliamentary, I would say, blueprint for how to deal with artificial intelligence at the level of parliaments in order to make sure that parliaments can all keep abreast of what is going on and make sure that artificial intelligence is used for positive things and minimise the risk of artificial intelligence, especially in terms of democracy processes around the world.

This is something that we are doing in an inclusive manner, having a discussion between parliamentarians and between parliamentarians and experts, so that we have a better understanding of what we're talking about in terms of artificial intelligence.

Because I think that currently we don't know enough about this new phenomenon, this new animal in the room.

But with that global reflection at the parliamentary level, maybe we can begin to understand its possible effects on democracy as a whole.

And we can then mobilise parliaments to actually grapple with this and put in place measures that would streamline the use of artificial intelligence.

And I think that from the discussions that have taken place so far, we see that the trend is towards regulation in a good sense, not restriction of artificial intelligence, because he has potential to do good.

It's doing.

We see there's evidence that it's doing good, but also there worrying trends that it could be something that could undermine democracy processes such as the one that we mentioned earlier, the spread of hate speech that has been exacerbated through the emergence of artificial intelligence.

So it's something that we need to do, try to maximise the possible positive impacts of artificial intelligence while minimising the it's negative impacts.

And we have to do this in an inclusive fashion to include those who have fostered the emergence of this new technology, the scientific community, scientific and technological community.

There should be a conversation with them, but also those bodies and entities that are using these new technologies for commercial purposes.

So together there should be a collective conversation so that, you know, at the end of the day, we have a win win situation where we protect the global community from the possible effects of artificial intelligence, negative effects of artificial intelligence.

Thank you, Secretary General.

I don't see any more questions online or in the room, so I think we'll close there.

Thank you again.

Thank you to those who made the effort to come and for those online as well.

Thank you very much.

I know it's a busy time just to say that we do have copies of the report as well and it's available, which I can send you in English, French and Spanish.

Thank you very much.

Have a good afternoon.

IPU Press conference: Launch of the IPU Women in Parliament Report - 05 March 2024