ABSTRACT
Assessments of women’s status and rights have often focused on the presence or absence of women in the key institutions of public life. The proportion of parliamentary seats held by women, for example, is often taken as a measure of the degree of the political inclusion of women. Other frequently-cited indicators for gauging women’s (and girls’) presence in public life are the proportion of female students in primary, secondary and tertiary education and the proportion of the labor force that is female. None of these indicators alone is a valid measurement of the status of women, of course, as they capture only narrow slices of the various aspects of public life. But women’s public presence does tell us something about their social status and their degree of freedom and opportunity. Useful aggregate indicators have been developed to facilitate cross-national comparison, such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and the Gender-Linked Development Index (GDI). These measures are of great use in comparative analysis, but they do not (and were not designed to) explain the political and social forces that shape women’s roles in public life. In order to better understand the reasons for the particular state of affairs regarding women’s presence in public life, this chapter examines two spheres in which the state has made explicit choices about the inclusion of women: the national parliament and the armed forces. In both cases, policy choices have significantly improved women’s presence in institutions traditionally virtually closed to them – and in both cases, an effective increase in women’s equality has been achieved through the use of the tools and the language of special circumstances.
