Equal political representation and an equal share of women in parliaments and the executives is obviously a human rights issue. In a representative democracy, one can reasonably expect to have a parliament that is roughly representative of the population in general: poor people should have their representatives or delegates just like rich people, women just like men, minorities just like majorities. This “representativity” or “representativeness” isn’t an absolute requirement. One can have a democracy without it. The people, after all, may decide that their views are best represented by an all-male, all-white body of parliamentarians for example.
However, it seems statistically unlikely that this would be their decision in each consecutive election in each democratic country. Imbalances in the demographics of parliament that persist over time and space are probably not the result of the choices of voters but of other factors, such as discrimination, unequal opportunities etc. If that’s the case, we are dealing with an imperfect democracy because democracy means equal influence and an equal chance to get elected (art. 21 of the Universal Declaration and art. 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights).
And that seems to be the case. Some people, therefore, propose “pink quotas” which impose minimum numbers of female representatives (something like affirmative action or positive discrimination). I’ll discuss the desirability of such quotas another time.
In the meantime, more data on equal representation, also for other countries, are here. Other human rights maps are here.
Your logic train derailed due to lack of underlying support ;)
There is a gender “imbalance” in political office primarily due the fact that women choose to run for office less often then men do. When they do choose to run women normally fair reasonably well in the elections, statistically outperforming men actually.
Well, that’s just moving the question a few yards down the road: what do women choose this?
Frankly that is an unknown. It is also largely an American phenomenon since most countries have more women choosing to run, even countries where women are actually oppressed.
I don’t think anyone has actually done a broad study on why exactly American women rarely choose to get into politics beyond the local level.
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