TO achieve the minimum 30% women representation in politics, Malaysia needs to introduce bold reforms.

Malaysia is shamefully backward in gender inclusion in the world, including in Southeast Asia. With only one woman amongst every nine parliamentarians, Malaysia is only better than Burma, Brunei and Thailand in the region.

Our country needs a quantum leap. The Joint Action Group for Gender Equality (JAG) urges Prime Minister Najib Razak to consider a bold move to introduce women-only additional seats (WOAS) for Parliament and state legislatures.

The National Conference on Gender and Electoral Reform (NCGER) – which concluded on November 24, 2017 – adopted two proposals on WOAS:

a) For legislatures with at least 20% but less than 30% women, the legislatures should be expanded to have 30% non-constituency seats (NCS) with a 50% women quota, thus ensuring that there would be a minimum 15% women presence.

(b) For legislatures with less than 20% women, the legislatures should be expanded to have 20% NCS all reserved only for women, thus ensuring that there would be a minimum 20% women presence.

The conference was organised by Institut Wanita Berdaya, Selangor.

NCS are like party-list seats in countries with party-list proportional representation (List-PR) systems, which normally represent special issues or interests instead of local issues.
As issues affecting women – such as gender-based violence and harassment, childcare, or socio-economic empowerment – are often statewide or nationwide in nature, they would be better articulated by women leaders and activists working on these specific issues; rather than by local constituency representatives.

Additionally, women’s perspectives must be represented in mainstream issues.

While Malaysian voters cannot vote directly for parties, NCS can nevertheless be allocated to all parties based on their vote share in the first-past-the-post (FPTP) elections.

Hence, NCS will not only increase women’s representation as a whole, but will also bring women’s voices up in every party.

Importantly, NCS/WOAS can have immediate effect.

Following the NCGER’s proposal, our Parliament – which currently has only 24 (10.8%) women members – should add 55 WOAS seats, which will ensure 20% women representation in the enlarged house of 277 seats.

If we had WOAS in the 13th general election, we would have 24 women constituency MPs and 55 WOAS parliamentarians, who would constitute 28.5% representation – very close to the minimum 30% global benchmark set in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action.

With this 20% WOAS formula, Penang, Johor, Perlis, and Pahang would have reached 30% in GE13. Even for Terengganu, where not even one woman was elected, there would be 20% women members representing statewide interests. All seven other states would score higher.

For Selangor, which currently has 14 (25%) women representatives, the 30% NCS formula with 50% women quota would have added 24 NCS members – 12 of them women. This would increase women’s total to 26 in the 80-member assembly and their percentage to 32.5%.

As real decisions are made in the Dewan Rakyat and state assemblies rather than Dewan Negara, introducing WOAS/NCS in the federal and state elected houses would be much more meaningful than the 30% appointment in Dewan Negara.

JAG urges the prime minister to introduce this bold reform as a groundbreaking legacy of his rule in government.

* The Joint Action Group For Gender Equality comprises the All Women’s Action Society (Awam), Perak Women For Women (PWW), Persatuan Kesedaran Komuniti Selangor (Empower), Sabah Women’s Action Resource Group (Sawo), Sisters In Islam (SIS), Tenaganita, Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) and Women’s Centre For Change (WCC).

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.