Gender equality and women’s place in politics

Last week the world, Malta included, marked International Women’s Day. There were no official events organised by the government, but there was a protest march by leftist groups whose aim is by and large to see the introduction of abortion, and a number of press statements issued by women’s organisations.

Women have come a long way since the day celebrating them came to be, but many would argue that there is still a long way to go.

Although the number of Presidents and Prime Ministers who are women has been on the rise in recent years, politics is still very much a men’s world.

And although Ursula von der Leyen and Roberta Metsola, as heads of the European Commission and the European Parliament respectively, hold prestigious appointments, European (and worldly) politics is still dominated by men.

Aside from this, men still occupy most places on company boards and in the public sector too. This in spite of the fact that more women are attending University and, added to this, more women than men are graduating.

We know, for example, that in 2023 the number of women who graduated from Malta’s University made up 59.7% of the total number of students. But then it is clear that this is not followed up when it comes to employment and especially in terms of top positions held.

The latest census data shows, for example, that men account for 76 per cent of the number of CEOs in Malta. It’s good to note that this is a 5% drop since the previous census, held in 2011. But the numbers show that the road ahead for women is still long and arduous.

It is also common knowledge that, broadly speaking, women earn less than men, even when holding the same positions. These are situations that the world recognises, but still does too little to address. We have heard the term gender equality a million times over the past years. We have heard politicians preach about the need for more equality. But here we are, in 2024, still facing the same problems that we had 10, 20 or 50 years ago.

It’s clear that we have not done enough.

Malta has then had a strange relationship with women in politics. We had two Presidents of the Republic who were women, but none of the major parties has had a woman as its leader. It has happened in the smaller parties, but the Labour and Nationalist parties are still to elect their first woman as leader in spite of having a history that dates back more than 100 years.

In the European Parliament elections, the first election in 2004 yielded no women MEPs, the second one in 2009 saw three women making it to Brussels in casual elections, the third election in 2014 had four women directly elected out of six representatives, and in 2019 we had three.

Conversely, we needed to install a gender mechanism to have more women elected in the national Parliament, and the maximum number of places allotted (12) were all taken up in 2022 as very few women made it to Parliament.