ELECT WOMEN FOR A CHANGE

Women have made significant inroads into political life over the last 30 years. Yet many nations still lag behind. In the face of these developments, a new global movement is taking shape. Building on decades of work to make politics more inclusive, these actors make a simple but striking demand: the full and equal sharing of political power between women and men. In other words: nothing less than gender parity. Tired of tokenism, they reject timid efforts to elect more women, embracing instead more ambitious and pathbreaking methods of achieving equal representation. 
 

Elect Women for a Change explains how to make this vision a reality. Defining parity in terms of access, power, and diversity, the book provides a history of the global parity movement, including the latest international frameworks in support of this goal. It provides a balanced assessment of the benefits, showing how parity can advance equality and human rights, promote qualified and diligent politicians, foster more responsive public policy, increase democratic legitimacy, and encourage gender equality in other spheres. Identifying socialization, discrimination, and backlash as barriers to parity, it outlines strategies used globally to overcome these obstacles and ends with a call to action to make parity a reality.