Define your own key
Key
| 1 | more than 40% |
| 2 | 20% to 39% |
| 3 | 10% to 19% |
| 4 | 1% to 9% |
| 5 | None |
| 6 | No Data |
Making Women's Voices Heard
What does it mean ?
The proportion of parliamentary seats held by women refers to the number of seats held be women members in single or lower chambers of national parliaments, divided by the total number of all occupied seats.
Why does it matter ?
MDG Goal 3 aimed to promote gender equality and empower women. One critical way of achieving this goal is to ensure women’s voices are heard at the national level when making policy decisions that affect them.
This indicator represents the proportion of parliamentary seats held by women for each country. The aim of this indicator is to show that countries which have greater representation of women by women are on the way to achieving gender equality and female empowerment.
How is it collected ?
National parliaments can be bicameral or unicameral. This indicator covers the single chamber in unicameral parliaments and the lower chamber in bicameral parliaments. It does not cover the upper chamber of bicameral parliaments. Seats are usually won by members in general parliamentary elections. Seats may also be filled by nomination, appointment, indirect election, rotation of members and by-election.
Seats refer to the number of parliamentary mandates, or the number of members of parliament.
The proportion of seats held by women in national parliament is derived by dividing the total number of seats occupied by women by the total number of seats in parliament.
There is no weighting or normalising of statistics.
Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) www.ipu.org. Data represent most recently available year, 2012 – 2015. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SG.GEN.PARL.ZS&country=
