Participation of Women in Political and Managerial Positions

Research Topic

This is a research project in the context of a master course in Geovisualization at the University of Zurich. In this project we focus on the UN sustainable development goal 5: Gender equality. The aim of the goal 5 is to "achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls". This means equal access to education, decent work, health care and also equal representation and participation in economic and political decision-making processes. In the context of this development goal we would like to look closer on the current participation of women in political and managerial positions.

Participation of women in political and economic leadership positions is a topic that has been part of worldwide discussions for some time. With the visualizations we produced in our geovisualization course, we want to show how female participation in these fields is represented at the moment. All our data is from the year 2016 which is the latest information we could receive for all the different data sets.

In the section Vizualisations you can choose between three different maps to see participation of women in political positions, participation of women in managerial positions and general education levels for each country. To get a direct comparison between the three parameters, scatterplots are shown further down.

Visualizations

The first map shows the percentage of seats of the national parliaments that are occupied by women. Brown colors indicate that more than half of the seats are held by men, green colors indicate that more than half of the seats are held by women. The more saturated the colors are, the more balanced is the ratio of women and men in the parliament.

The second map shows the percentage of managerial positions that are held by women in the same way than in the previous map.

In the third map you can see the percentage of people that are enrolled in secondary education compared to total population. This map includes women as well as men because we want to find out if the level of education in a country can have an influence on participation of women in leading positions.

To get a better look of small countries, you can zoom in and out with the plus/minus sign on the upper left. To see the exact values of a country and also some additional information, just move the cursor over the country you are interested in.







Results

Women in parliament Rwanda
The map on women in parliament shows that in 2016 only in two countries (Rwanda and Bolivia) women represent more than 50% of the national parliament. Thereby it is to mention that we only looked at the lower or single houses and neglected the upper house or senate as a lot of countries only have a lower or single house. The story of Rwanda’s majority-female parliament has a rather sad background, as its change in national and local politics goes back on the genocide in 1994, after which about 70% of the remained population was female (The Guardian 2014).

The map also shows that in 2016 in quite a lot of countries the share of women in national parliament was below 40%. It also seems that there are no big differences between countries of the Global North and countries of the Global South in general. This means you can find countries of the Global North with very low percentages of women in national parliament and on the other hand for example the countries with the highest percentage of women in national parliament are countries of the Global South. Due to the IPU data, Switzerland for example was in 2016 only ranked number 36 with 32% women in national parliament (Nationalrat). But it is also to mention that we had only data on national parliaments, on a local scale the situation might be different. And we also do not know how many women run for political positions.

For the map on women in managerial positions we had data for fewer countries than we had on the political positions. Most of the available data is for countries of the Global North. The map shows that there is no country with a higher share of women than men in managerial positions. The map shows also some geographical patterns. It can be observed, that in the Middle East almost no women are in managerial position, whereas in Europe most countries have at least a share of 20-30% of women in managerial positions. If we compare the map with the one on political positions, we can see that in some countries, as for example in the USA, Australia and France, the share of women in managerial position is higher than the share of women in national parliament. And also the first scatterplot where we compared women in managerial and political positions shows that a high share of women in political positions doesn’t necessarily mean that there is also a high share of women in managerial positions. But in the case of the Middle Eastern countries there can be observed, that these countries show a low share of women in managerial as well as in political positions. This can probably be explained by the patriarchal system of most of those countries.

Regarding the percentage of people enrolled in secondary education per country, it can be said that it seems that the different continents have different shares of people enrolled in secondary education. Unsurprisingly, Europe, North America and some Asian countries have a very high education level. This is even more clear if you look at the scatterplot of secondary education and political participation where the country points are colored according to their continent. Secondary education seems to have no direct influence on participation of women in politics. The share of women in managerial positions on the other hand seems to have some correlation with secondary education even though there is not that much data available for these two data sets.

Contact

Meret Burkart Charlotte Lienhard
Master Student Geography
University of Zurich
meret.burkart@uzh.ch
Master Student Geography
University of Zurich
charlotte.lienhard@uzh.ch