|
||
PRESS-CLIPPING - April 2005. |
||
| home
|
Elections Again After only three months of peace, Croatian voters are again called to vote in elections. This time local ones. Although, according to a widely accepted opinion, the local elections are less important than parliamentary, the situation has changed a little this time, so that the local politicians (as well as those on the national level) have seen the importance in winning points on local level and thus acknowledging their status on national level. Since the beginning of election campaigns, the issue of women’s participation in election lists has suddenly gained much attention through the introduction of sex/gender quotas and the disregard of the Law on Gender Equality. Women have again been push out of the race for leading places in local governments. In most party candidate lists for county assemblies and city and municipality committees there are hardly 25 percent of women, and they are mostly at the end of the lists, which in start prevents them from winning some position. I would not like to go deeper into sex/gender analyses of diverse party candidate lists, because there is, unfortunately, hardly any bigger difference among different parties – actually the biggest parties like SDP (Socialist-Democratic party), HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union), HNS (Croatian People’s Party), HSS (Croatian Peasants Party) and HSP (Croatian Party of the Rights) have few women on their candidate lists and they are in direct breach of the previously mentioned Law. Interestingly enough, only the minor parties with less chance for success have obeyed the Law. Women’s Network Croatia and the party Zeleni za Zagreb (Greens for Zagreb – one of those minor parties with equal amount of women and men on their lists) have submitted a request to the National Election Committee to disqualify the parties which have less than 20 percent of women on their lists. In case the Committee rejects their request, they will be ready to go to the Constitutional Court to demand their request. All this proves the need to introduce into the Law on Local Elections the strict quotas according to which the election lists with less than 40 percent of one sex/gender would be rejected. The National Institute for Statistical Data has recently published the data on average wages in Croatia for the year 2003, according to which men earned an average wage of 4134 kuna or 11.4 percent more than women who earned an average wage of 3710 kuna. This statistical difference puts Croatia among the European countries with the lowest difference in wages between men and women. The difference in Slovenia, for example, is only 9 percent, and in Germany and the Slovak Republic it is even 23 percent. But in Croatia, there is still a rigid split in men and women occupations, where women mostly work in badly paid professions. We only hope that this difference will be alleviated in time. Branimira Mrak
|
|
|
|