As in 2008, 2010 and 2014, none of the female candidates standing in Tonga’s 2021 general election this week have been successful.

Out of a total of 38,500 votes, 34,198 were cast for the male candidates and only 4352 were cast for the 12 female candidates, down from 14 percent of total votes in 2017 to 11 percent in 2021.

The only female MP incumbent running, Losaline Ma’asi, did not make it for a second term.

At the 2017 snap elections she won 35 percent (1034) of the total number of votes in her constituency Tongatapu 5. On Thursday, she won only 23 percent (614).

Her Royal Highness Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Halaevalu Mataʻaho Napua-o-kalani Tukuʻaho at the opening of Tonga Women’s Parliament 2021 — just three days before election day — reminded us that there is a need to move away from just a desire to increase the number of women in Parliament to having a concrete action plan to achieve it.

She made a strong statement that the current arrangements are not sufficient for increasing the number of women in Parliament. This is the key to opening up the dialogue for re-visiting and re-educating decision makers on temporary special measures (TSM) such as reserved seats, affirmative action party quotas and legislature quotas that have long been contested in Tonga.

Women in Tonga were given universal suffrage in 1951. This was a political milestone for women navigated by her late Majesty Queen Sālote Tupou III who was one of only two women in Tonga’s history to occupy the powerful position of monarch.

Only 6 women MPs
However, since 1951, only six women have been elected to Parliament, a few more than once, for a total of only 10 female electoral victories.

The irony is that the majority of those who not only registered but who turned up to vote have been women, at all general elections since 2005.

So what is happening?

Two major pieces of research on voter’s perception of women as leaders conducted in 2016-17 and 2020-21, using the same research methodology, showed that the majority of eligible voters believed key decision-making and leadership roles are best left to men and that roles such as household work and nurturing children are a women’s responsibility.

The following table gives a few highlights of the comparative results of these studies:

This widespread belief that leadership and key decision-making roles are best suited to men unfortunately translates into the results we see at election after election.

To change the story, one needs to have a good understanding of the difference between equality and equity.

In Tonga, women do not have the same social, cultural, political and economic experiences as men. Society does not perceive women the same way they perceive men.

Women pushed backwards
Moral standards and domestic expectations are not held against men as highly and rigidly as they are held against women. This automatically pushes women backwards, further down the field and it soon becomes clear that the playing field is not level at all.

Equity forces us to dig deeper and think more critically. To understand the lived experiences of women, we need to unpack the constructed private and public dichotomy — society’s patriarchal expectations of women.

The social expectation that women will prioritise managing the home and its affairs, taking care of the children, and attending to their husbands’ needs will continue to result in attitudes at the voting booth that do not favour women as leaders.

Temporary special measures are measures that work on changing attitudes and behaviour over time as the general public becomes exposed to larger numbers of women in Parliament.

For younger people, in particular, having more women in Parliament will become a norm for them rather than something to be desired. Once TSMs are removed, the country will return to the normal voting procedure with the anticipation that voters no longer frame leadership as a gendered role.

In the case of Rwanda, a constitutional amendment in 2003 provided that 30 percent of its seats must be reserved for women. By 2018, the share of females MPs had increased to 60 percent.

Often zero representation
The last four elections in Tonga have never resulted in more than 8 percent female representation in Parliament, and often, as this time, it has been zero.

We need significant change. We must aim for at least 30 percent or more by taking legislative action.

If this is not possible now, we need to build our women’s movement over the next four to five years and work towards revolutionary change in attitudes and mindsets — it can be done.
#WatchThisSpace2025

‘Ofa-Ki-Levuka (‘Ofa) Guttenbeil-Likiliki is director of the Women and Children Crisis Centre (WCCC) in Tonga, a women’s rights activist and a filmmaker. Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Rappler in Manila

Rappler CEO Maria Ressa is among Time‘s “100 Women of the Year”, the news magazine has revealed ahead of International Women’s Day on Sunday.

Time‘s “100 Women of the Year,” a list of the most influential women of the past century, puts the spotlight on “influential women who were often overshadowed”.

“This includes women who occupied positions from which the men were often chosen, like world leaders Golda Meir and Corazon Aquino, but far more who found their influence through activism or culture,” the magazine said.

READ MORE: Time magazine’s ‘100 women of the year’ – and the century

Time recognised Ressa as its Woman of the Year for 2018, noting her already impressive career in news before starting Rappler in 2012.

“But the news site turned into a global bellwether for free, accurate information at the vortex of two malign forces: one was the angry populism of an elected president with authoritarian inclinations, Rodrigo Duterte; the other was social media,” the magazine wrote in its article about Ressa.

Time said that, since naming her as a 2018 “Person of the Year,” Ressa “has continued to navigate the murk between social media and despotism, calling out her findings to the rest of us at the risk of her life”.

Other women from Southeast Asia who made it to the list include late Philippine president Corazon Aquino (1986) and Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1990).

Aquino was named Woman of the Year in 1986 after the democracy icon won the presidency and ended the nearly 21-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Former Time editor-in-chief Nancy Gibbs said of the project: “The women profiled here enlarged their world and explored new ones, broke free of convention and constraint, welcomed into community the lost and left behind.

“They were the different drummers, to whose beat a century marched without always even knowing it.”

“Women,” Gibbs writes, “were wielding soft power long before the concept was defined.”

For the complete list of Time’s “100 Women of the Year,” click here.

Republished from Rappler news website.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz