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What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies--48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005b). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of women's equality?
The answer is gender quotas. The Rwandan constitution stipulates that women must hold at least 30% of political positions (International IDEA 2005). Rwanda is not unusual in having a gender quota; most of the countries in the top 20 spots on the Inter-Parliamentary Union's (IPU) list of women in national parliaments have some kind of gender quota in place. Rwanda is the only one on the list of countries in the top 20 spots that has reserved seats set aside for women. Five of the countries in the top 20 (Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, Guyana, and Iraq) have candidate quota laws that require a certain percentage of all legislative candidates to be women. Eleven of the countries on the IPU list have voluntary quotas at the party level (Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden). Gender quota laws are a fairly recent phenomenon. In most cases, countries with gender quota laws have adopted them within the last 15 years (since 1991). Quota scholar Drude Dahlerup (1998) and others have suggested that a kind of "quota fever" is spreading around the world.
I find the global cachet of gender quotas intriguing. How did quotas get to be such a popular idea in the international community, when they have been so vilified in the United States? Quota is a bad word in the United States. Even if the term were semantically disguised, by calling it "positive discrimination" or something similar, the notion of setting aside a determined percentage of anything for anybody is...