Playing Their Part? Parliamentary Institutions and Gender Mainstreaming (original) (raw)

During the 1990s, campaigns to increase the number of women in parliament became an important part of the international agenda; in countries transitioning from Communist or authoritarian regimes the under-representation of women was seen as a significant democratic deficit. However it was soon recognised that there was a need to move 'beyond numbers' and to examine the kind of institutional supports that facilitated the representation of women's interests or the so-called 'substantive representation of women'. The first wave of research in this area was concerned primarily with the role of women's policy agencies, which had multiplied across the world in the UN Decade for Women . 1 Other sources of institutional support for gender equality agendas that have received critical attention include transnational institutions, 2 transnational advocacy networks and, in developing democracies, bilateral or multilateral donors.