Gender Parity and Multicultural Feminism: Towards a New Synthesis

Gender quotas, once thought of as controversial, are now embraced across the world. Since the mid-1990s, countries in all regions have increasingly adopted gender quotas in their political decision-making bodies. Over eighty countries’ laws or constitutions now set electoral quotas for women.1 Since 2000, this trend has been both proliferating and deepening. The familiar temporary quotas promising a minimum threshold for women of around thirty percent of the total in legislative bodies or on candidate lists are being replaced by more ambitious requirements for “balanced participation” and even parity, defined as comprising fifty percent of each sex. Such quotas are also expanding to cover more domains of decision-making. These trends toward greater participation of women do not occur in a void. They take place in heterogeneous societies, which are divided and stratified along axes of religion, nationality, ethnicity, indigeneity, and culture, and in which minority women tend to be particularly disadvantaged.