What Do Women Want? Their Representatives in the State Duma
By Francesca Mereu
Staff Writer
MOSCOW - Whatever the political make-up of the new State Duma, one result is already virtually a shoo-in: Women deputies will be in a tiny minority, just as they have been in all three elections since Soviet rule ended in 1991. And of the small number of women in Parliament, only two - Irina Khakamada, the co-leader of the Union of Right Forces party, and Communist deputy Svetlana Savitskaya, the first woman to walk in space - made the top five in their parties' lists this time around. Of the parties to declare their lists, a slight increase in women's representation can be observed: Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and the Communists each have two women in their federal top 10. But overall, political analysts do not hold out much hope for a significant increase in women's representation in the new Duma. "I don't think the situation is going to change," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, the head of the Panorama think tank. "You'll have the same number of women in the Duma that you have now - no more than 10 percent." In fact, the percentage of women deputies has been steadily falling. Fourteen percent of deputies in the 1993 chamber were women, but this figure shrank to 10 percent in 1995 and just 8 percent in 1999. Out of 450 members of the current Duma, a mere 35 are women. Women's representation in the Federation Council is even slimmer - just seven out of 178 members, or 4 percent. Apart from Valentina Matviyenko, the St. Petersburg gubernatorial candidate and former presidential envoy, the country's next most prominent women politician is probably Irina Khakamada, the SPS co-leader. But even Khakamada, who takes second place on the party's list this year, said that life in the Duma is not easy for women. "The bureaucracy is the ruling class - and traditionally this is represented by men," she said. "For women it is very difficult to overcome all the obstacles to get into politics." She said that for women's rights to improve, the country needs to develop its civil society and democratic structures further. A former associate professor of macroeconomics at Moscow State University, Khakamada is responsible for SPS initiatives aimed at developing small and medium-sized businesses - and has been a staunch supporter of small business since the early days of perestroika. In 1993, she launched her own political party, called Common Cause, and was elected to the Duma. She later joined the SPS bloc and was given third place in its 1999 Duma list after Sergey Kiriyenko and Boris Nemtsov. For Maria Arbatova, an outspoken feminist who became famous as a regular guest on "Ya Sama", or "Myself," one of the country's first television talk shows, the reason for the low number of women in parliament is "very simple. Women did not have and do not have money," she said. Arbatova, who failed to get elected to the Duma in 1999 when she ran on the Union of Right Forces ballot, is the co-chair of the Human Rights party. In this election her party has joined forces with the Party of Life, headed by Sergei Mironov, the Chairman of the Federation Council. "The new Russian political elite was born in a very specific way. [During perestroika], while women were waiting in line for food, men carved the country into pieces," Arbatova says. The low percentage of women in the Duma is a reflection of the structure of Russia society in general, she said. In support of her claim, Arbatova cites figures from Goskomstat, the government statistics agency, which show that men own 92 percent of private property. "This [percentage] is very similar to what we have in the Duma," Arbatova said. Yelena Yershova, the president of the Consortium of Women's NGOs and a member of the government's Commission on Human Rights, went further. She said the reason so few women make it into the Duma is linked to the "patriarchal structure" of Russian society. "Our male deputies are chauvinist and do not allow women to get into the Duma," she said. Yershova advocates introducing quotas for women deputies. The quota issue was raised by women's organizations in the mid-1990s, and in 1997 Russian women's rights groups proposed that a minimum of 30 percent of places in parliament and in government structures be reserved for women. But the proposal, introduced as an amendment to a bill on elections, was voted down in the second reading. In the debate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic party, made his views clear on quotas for women deputies in typically blunt fashion. "Russian women do not want [political] power, but a husband with a good salary," he said. Yegor Ligachyov, a Communist deputy, disagreed with Zhirinovsky's viewpoint, but thinks a law on quotas would be useless. "We can approve a law that gives 40 or whatever percent to women, but it would be absurd," he said. "Voters would not think about the quotas, and they are the ones who decide the destiny of a candidate." But Vitaly Lednik, a Unity faction deputy, supports quotas, which he says are necessary to get laws on women's rights passed. "The few women we have in the Duma are very active, but if they raise a problem that is strictly related to their gender they cannot do anything," he said. The quota idea was one revived from the Soviet era, when women had reserved places in the rubber-stamp Soviet legislature - 30 percent in the Supreme Soviet and between 40 and 50 percent at lower levels. But the real power structure, the Communist party, remained overwhelmingly male-dominated. In the late 1980s, as legislative bodies began to acquire real power under perestroika, the quota system was abolished. In the Congress of People's Deputies elected in 1990, women won less than 6 percent of seats. Alexandra Buratayeva, a former ORT news presenter who in 1999 ran for the pro-Kremlin Unity faction from her native Kalmyk republic, is the deputy head of the Duma Committee for International Affairs. Buratayeva said she swapped journalism for politics because she wanted to do something "to change the life of the country." She said a lot of women are afraid of going into politics because they think that the Duma is a rough place to work. "Journalists should write about not only when deputies fight or swear - which is very rare - but also about the positive side of our work there," she said. According to Yershova, the only political victory Russian women achieved in the past decade was in April 2002, when a law was passed guaranteeing equal rights and opportunities for women. The law, an initiative by the Consortium of Women's NGOs, included practical measures aimed at gender equality, but not the idea of quotas. "It's not the solution to our problems, but it is a small step forward," said Aleftina Fedulova, the president of the Women of Russia movement.
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