Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Women in Government



The average percentage of women in national parliaments around the world is 24.3%. The United States is way below that average figure with a shocking 19.4% representation rate in the House of Representatives. Of the 435 members in the House only 84 are women.

Florencia Mangini has created a choropleth map which shows the percentage of women in parliaments around the world. Her Proportion of Women in National Parliaments map reveals that Rwanda has the highest level of female representation of all the countries in the world, with women making up 61.3% of parliament. Rwanda is actually only one of two countries in the world where women form the majority of elected representatives. The other country is Bolivia where women make up 53.1% of the national parliament. The country with the next highest level of female representation is Cuba, with 48.9%.

The data used seems to be from 2017 so the map might be a little out of date. However the data doesn't seem to diverge too much from the percentages listed in Wikipedia's Women in Government. What is clear is that women in the United States have about as much representation in government as women in the Kyrgyz Republic - a country which in 2013 passed a law banning women under the age of 23 from traveling abroad without a parent or guardian.

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