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In the approval of the electoral reform, an article was included so that the election lists in which five or more seats are elected are made up of 50-50.
As well as legislative act 03 of 1954, the Electoral Code that this Wednesday debated the plenary session of the Senate – with its pros and cons – will also go down in feminist history for determining that the lists of constituencies that elect five or more seats in Congress , as well as in the other public corporations, are made up of 50% women and 50% men.
The legislative act mentioned was the great inheritance of the suffragettes who demanded the right to choose and be elected and with this also came the process of identification. In other words, after more than 130 years of democracy, women were citizens, the principle for the 1991 Constitution to recognize men and women with equal rights.
However, although the incoming political letter was guarantor and allowed women to participate in politics, it did not contemplate the structural inequalities that act as a barrier for them to reach positions of power. “What the 1991 Constitution does is a look to the future and it recognizes a basic principle of human rights, such as the principle of equality. From this point of view, I believe, it was understood that we had, not only the same rights and duties, but that we had equal conditions to gain power, “said Alejandra Barrios, director of the MOE, to The viewer.
This interpretation has led to the confusion of concepts of equality and parity, a reflection of the at least six times that projects that are in line with parity have collapsed. While equality speaks to us in terms of human rights, parity, from the outset, introduces us to decision-making spaces, to the public space that cost women a lot to break in, because of the idea that they should be at the service of home and family.
“The concept of parity is directly related to the concept of representativeness of women in the public arena, in the public sphere. This concept was born because affirmative actions are sought, that is, legislative proposals to eliminate the gaps and for women to increase their participation and representation, ”says Barrios.
In Colombia, people began to talk about affirmative actions and gender quotas since 2000, when the first law (581) that pointed to this line was adopted, This determined that 30% of the senior administrative positions of the three branches of public power should be held by women.
The first law that responded to the commitments agreed to in the Beijing Platform for Action, signed by the United Nations countries at the Fourth Women’s Conference in 1995. And almost 15 years after this duty assumed, Colombia processed the Law of Quotas (1,474 of 2011), with which it secured the quota of 30% of women on the lists for popularly elected positions in public corporations.
In the almost 10 years the law has been in force, 30% of women have never been reached in any public corporation in the country. That includes Congress, which has failed to break the 21% ceiling. For this reason, attempts to legislate on the subject and make the political participation of women effective and real have increased, since the 2018 and 2019 elections have shown that the current regulations, instead of encouraging more women to arrive, has stalled.
Today what was approved in the Senate in the Electoral Code is one more step to continue paying off the debt that began to be collected with that legislative act 03 of 1954 regarding the political rights of women. It is not definitive and does not guarantee effective and real participation, as the Paridad YA campaign has highlighted, but it is a wise move to give meaning to our democracy, the same democracy that boasts of being the oldest in Latin America, but perhaps , one of the most backward in ensuring political parity for women.
