ABSTRACT
The advance of women through the political system has been one of the most significant developments of the second half of the twentieth century. For the first time we have seen women prime ministers and presidents. The proportion of women members of parliament in our ten countries has increased from just 5.8 per cent in 1945 to over 25 per cent by the end of 1997, and the percentage of women in national governments has increased from a derisory level to 28 per cent over the same period. The number of women involved in political decision making accelerated in a number of countries as we reached the end of the twentieth century, and the goal of ‘parity’ between women and men no longer appears an impossible dream. But does the increased participation of women in decision-making
positions make a difference? Has the political agenda been altered or the style of politics changed? At present, available studies are surprisingly scarce and inconclusive. Even in one of our Scandinavian countries, Denmark, a recent paper claimed that ‘there is not the necessary empirical material to answer this question’.1 At the top of the political system, numbers of women leaders have been so small that the absence of detailed studies of their behaviour is perhaps unsurprising. However, there have been a handful of studies of women parliamentarians, particularly in Britain and Norway, and their findings will be referred to. Given the accelerating numbers of women in parliament over the last 10 to 20 years (see Table 8), one would expect the number of detailed studies to increase significantly in the next few years, increasing our understanding of the ways in which women have or have not changed politics. In the absence of large numbers of detailed studies, the best way of
approaching the question of what difference women in power make is to ask what the political system lacks when women are excluded or underrepresented. Once we can see what a political system lacks
without women, we can assess the difference the presence of women might be expected to make, or indeed whether we could expect women to make any significant difference. Before we do that, however, it is necessary to review a number of theories on women and power, which have implications for our discussion on whether women make a difference. Broadly, these theories divide into ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ viewpoints. It is particularly important for the optimistic theories that women do demonstrate a real difference; the pessimistic hypotheses assume that women will never achieve real power, and as a result will never be in a position to make a difference.
