equality

The Need for more Women in Power in the World

On March 8th 2017 it was International Women's day. A reminder of the still existing gap between men and women in practically everything: pay salary, or just basic women's right that are still sorely lacking in most countries in the world.

I particularly think that the field of politics needs more women to create more positive role models for girls and to establish a more inclusive and equal world.

On his blog, Joni Hoppen from Aquarela gathered 65 indexes from 188 countries. These data come from world organizations and institutions such as the World Bank and Unesco and one of these indexes happen to be the number of seats in parliament held by women in 2014. I thought it would be interesting to do a quick data visualization with Tableau and see how the countries are ranking up. 

To be honest, I was surprised to see some African countries topping the list. Rwanda is the only country out of two where women are majority in parliament. This can be explained by the mandatory composition in their Chamber of Deputies where 24 seats out of 80 (30%) are reserved exclusively to women, 3 for the youth and disabled and the rest by universal suffrage. Now that's pretty progressive!

in 2015, when Justin Trudeau took office as the Prime Minister of Canada, one of his pledge was to appoint as many women as men in his cabinet. A bold and right move in my view. If the chosen data was from last year, Canada would have jumped from 37th (thanks to the Conservatives) to third position! Who knows, maybe in the next election we will have our second female Prime Minister (first one being Kim Campbell)!