Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Engendering Change

From my half-attentive watching of the various electoral races around Minnesota and some of the more important ones around the country, female candidates seem to be rather more prominent than in other elections. Here in Minnesota, think Rowley (for whom I'll be happy to vote), Klobuchar (ditto), Wetterling (I wish), Bachmann (never never never). In this vein, the Minneosota Monitor political blog has published a look at gender implications of the 30 most important races for Senate or the House of Representatives.

The good news is that "if women win all of these contests [which we don't want, since lots of the XX types are GOP] this will bring the number of women in the House to almost 80, or about 18% — still embarrassingly small for the self-proclaimed leading democracy in the world compared to the total percentage of women in the population (over 51%), though somewhat better than the less than 4% in 1974." The bad news is that "by comparison, 66 countries in the world have legislatures or parliaments with higher percentages of women occupying seats."