Topic for Integrated Essay – Women in Politics
“One of the quiet underreported tidal waves of the past decade has been the rise of women in
public life. It could reshape politics as we know it.”
How may the unique characteristics of women be expected to impact the world we live in?
Using support from the two texts you have been provided, write a five-paragraph essay.
Explain the changes you envision due to the increasing presence of women in the political
arena.
Source 1
Keepers of the Peace
By Emily Flynn Vencat
At the age of 14, Nesreen Barwari was thrown into one of Saddam Hussein's political prisons. At
24, she was a Kurdish refugee, struggling for survival on Iraq's Turkish border. A decade later, in
2003, she became the only woman to hold a cabinet post in Iraq's first post-Saddam government.
Unlike the typical Middle Eastern leader's ascent to power, Barwari's journey reads like the life of a
charity worker. The Harvard-educated minister headed up the United Nations' Rebuilding Iraq
project after the Gulf War; later she led the Kurdistan Regional Government's reconstruction of
3,000 destroyed villages. When she became minister of Municipalities and Public Works, she set
out to convince the Governing Council of the vital role women should play in rebuilding the
country. "At first they were against it," she says. "They would say, 'We don't have enough qualified
women,' and I would say right in their face: 'We are all building the new Iraq!' "
Nowhere are women leaders more essential than in countries devastated by war. Studies from the
World Economic Forum and Harvard-based nonprofit the Initiative for Inclusive Security show that
women are better at creating and keeping the peace in post-conflict societies because women are--
generally--less violent than their male counterparts. Increasingly, citizens in such societies are
recognizing that and turning to women for help. In Rwanda's most recent election, women won 49
percent of the seats in Parliament--the highest proportion in the world. The Iraqi Constitution,
passed by referendum last month, guarantees women 25 percent of the seats in Parliament.
Liberians hoping to secure peace after decades of civil war could become the first African country
with a woman president if they elect Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in the final round of balloting on Nov.
8.
Perhaps the greatest hope is that increasing the ranks of women in government will help prevent
future wars. Swanee Hunt, head of The Initiative for Inclusive Security, a multimillion-dollar
nonprofit supporting the work of women in conflict zones, says: "During the [Bosnian] war, I asked
the prime minister of Bosnia, Haris Silajdzic, 'If half of the people around the table at the very
beginning had been women, would there have been a war?' And he said, 'No. Women think long
and hard before they send their children out to kill other peoples' children'."
Are women actually more peaceful than men? Looking at Cameroon, Bolivia and Malaysia, a
recent World Economic Forum study found that when women have a greater say in spending
priorities, they spend less on the military. "When women reach 30 or 40 percent of government,
you get much more funding for health care and education," says Hunt. And according to Harvard
psychologist Rose McDermott's simulated-conflict studies, the more money a country spends on its
military, the more likely it is to go to war. Based on 500 hours of interviews, the Initiative for
Inclusive Society reports: "Women are particularly adept at bridging the ethnic, religious and
political divides."
Countless anecdotes tell the same tale. During the peace talks that led to Northern Ireland's Good
Friday agreement in 1998, male negotiators walked out of the sessions in frustration, while women
kept the dialogue alive. "Men are stubborn," says Monica McWilliams, a signatory to the
agreement. "Women are more comfortable seeking compromise. They see it as a strength, not a
weakness."
In the aftermath of war, societies often rely on women to rebuild because many of the men are dead
or injured. In Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan, women's groups set up centers dedicated to helping rape
survivors reclaim their lives. "[After the genocide], the role of women changed from reproduction
to production," says Aloisea Inyumba, a Rwandan governor and former head of the National Unity
and Reconciliation Commission, who helped find homes for 500,000 orphans--often persuading
survivors to take in their enemies' children. "We were the wives left as widows, the mothers whose
children died. We are the owners of the postwar issues." In Iraq, after the Gulf War, Barwari risked
death by returning to Baghdad to earn a degree in architecture, then used it to help build housing
for refugees. "I felt so victorious, as though I'd taken my degree from the heart of Saddam's
regime," she says.
Today the global average of women in parliament is just 16 percent--ranging from as little as 7.7
percent in the Arab states to 39.8 percent in the Nordic countries. According to the World
Conference on Women, they should represent at least 30 percent of Parliament--a target adopted in
2000 by the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. Reaching that goal certainly won't solve all the
world's problems over-night. But it can bring hope for peace in countries once mired in blood.
http://www.newsweek.com/keepers-peace-115545
source 2
First Ladies, in The Truest Sense
By Fareed Zakaria
Sometimes the most important stories in the world don't get much attention
because they're powerful but slow trends that can't be easily covered. They
provide no single great event for cameras to focus on, nor a powerful image
everyone can easily grasp. (How do you televise globalization?) Last week,
however, something happened that gives us a rare opportunity to look at one
such trend. On Nov. 8, Liberians elected the Harvard-educated Ellen Johnson-
Sirleaf, 67, to be their next leader. This is newsworthy by itself because Johnson-
Sirleaf will be Africa's first female president. But it's an even bigger story
because, on the world stage, it's not an isolated event. One of the quiet,
underreported tidal waves of the past decade has been the rise of women in
public life. It could reshape politics as we know it.
Look at what's happening elsewhere. Next week, Angela Merkel will become the
first female chancellor of Germany. In voting over the next two months,
Michelle Bachelet will likely be elected president of Chile; if so, she will be the
first woman elected to lead a major Latin American country. Since the 1990s,
more than 30 women have become heads of government. In the 1950s there was
just one. (I doubt anyone remembers: Suhbaataryn Yanjmaa, president of
Mongolia.)
It's not just heads of state. Whatever else happens in the Iraqi elections on Dec.
15, we know one thing for sure: women will fill at least 25 percent of seats in the
new Parliament. That's because the Iraqi Constitution has a quota requiring it.
(The current Parliament is actually 31 percent female, and six of the
government's 32 ministers are women.) The Afghan Constitution has a similar
25 percent quota. And these are part of a global pattern.
Overall, 50 countries have quotas for female representation in their legislatures.
In many countries, like Sweden, political parties have adopted rules that force
them to field a set number of women candidates. (Forty-five percent of the
Swedish Legislature is female.) The world record for female representation is
held by Rwanda, with women making up 49 percent of its lower house. The
United States ranks 67th in the world by this measure, with only 15 percent of
the House of Representatives being female. The lowest representation by region
is in the Arab world, with women making up only 8 percent of legislatures.
What difference does it make? Does it really matter that a president or a
representative is male or female? Many voters seem to think so. A 2000 Gallup
poll in Latin America found that 62 percent of people believed that women
would do better than men at fighting poverty, 72 percent favored women for
improving education and 53 percent thought women would make better
diplomats. There is growing evidence that, at the very least, where women make
up a significant percentage of government, they tend to hold priorities that are
different from men's. The World Economic Forum found, in a study of just three
countries, that women wanted more money for health care, education and social
welfare, and less for the military. Across the globe, women are perceived as less
corrupt.
This is consistent with growing evidence at a micro level that women are better
recipients of aid than men. Around the world, if you give cash to a mother, she
tends to use it to invest in children's health and education. (A man, on the other
hand, will often take it and head to the local watering hole.) "Studies from Brazil
show that survival possibilities of a child increase by 20 percent if the income is
in the hands of the mother rather than the father," says the World Bank's Mayra
Buvinic.
There is another perceived difference between men and women. Seven years
ago, Francis Fukuyama published an article in Foreign Affairs in which he drew
on the rapidly growing field of evolutionary biology to argue that "aggression,
violence, war, and intense competition for dominance... are more closely
associated with men than women." He concluded that "a world run by women
would follow different rules... and it is towards this kind of world that all post-
industrial societies in the West are moving. As women gain power in these
countries, the latter should become less aggressive, adventurous, competitive,
and violent." He even asks the politically incorrect question, could some
"female" traits have negative effects for governance.
Fukuyama's view was denounced by some feminists for ignoring the reality that
war is a complex event produced by many forces--not just machismo--and for
propagating a stereotypical view of women as "soft" and men as "hard." But
there does appear to be growing scientific evidence that certain basic
distinctions between men and women are hard-wired. There are always the
female exceptions--Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi--just as there
are male ones--the Buddha, Gandhi--but there are some studies that support the
general distinction between most men and women.
It is much too soon to be able to tell how different the world would be if women
were equal partners in government. But it's a trend that's coming soon to a
country near you, so keep watching.
http://www.newsweek.com/first-ladies-truest-sense-115327
