Gender equality forms the hub of human rights and is the cornerstone to achieving the sustainable development goals (SDG) of nations. Achieving gender parity is crucial, as women and girls represent half the world’s population and are pivotal to confronting and mitigating some of the most pressing challenges of our time, and in finding and implementing appropriate solutions.
Attaining gender equality is especially important to countries such as Kuwait where the relatively small population means that engaging and involving everyone in all spheres of the country’s development is critical. Yet women, who form a little over half the country’s citizens, remain for the most part excluded from key decision-making processes and from participating effectively in legislative activities. Despite their criticality to national progress, women continue to be politically disadvantaged and remain grossly under-represented in the National Assembly.
Political empowerment in particular is key to entrenching the hard-won gains that Kuwaiti women have notched over the last two decades. Strengthening political empowerment is also important in preventing the rights attained from being gradually gnawed off or diluted through policies and procedures that are increasingly being introduced as a result of political exigencies. Although they have made substantial gains in various other domains, women still lack adequate economic and political empowerment that engender gender parity.
No surprise then that the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender-Gap report that grades countries on the basis of gender parity, ranked Kuwait in 143rd spot among the 156 countries assessed in the 2021 report. While the country scored high in the two sub-indexes of educational attainment (59th globally), and in health and survival (94th), it tanked to the 137th spot in terms of economic participation and opportunity.
However, it was in political empowerment of women that Kuwait ranked the lowest. At 153rd spot on the global index for political empowerment, Kuwait was just three spots shy of the bottom of the rankings. This is ironic, considering that the country is the only one in the immediate neighborhood that has an elected parliament and universal suffrage for citizens, and yet it ranked the lowest among states in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap report for 2021 also showed that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as a whole trailed other global regions in terms of both, overall gender gap and in political empowerment of women. With an average population-weighted score of 60.9 percent, the MENA region has the largest overall gender gap (about 40%) yet to be closed.
In political empowerment of women, the region again scored the lowest relative to other regions, closing only 12.1 percent of this gap. The global average in this sub-index was 21.8 percent, revealing the wide gender chasm that remains to be covered before women can attain parity with men in their political empowerment. With the exception of the United Arab Emirates, where there are as many women as men in the parliament, women make up just 18.3 percent of parliamentarians across the MENA region.
At the current rate of progress, the WEF estimates it will take the world 146 years to attain gender parity in politics. To clarify, the years to attain gender parity mentioned by the WEF report are statistically a weak prediction method, as they estimate the future based on a straight-line extrapolation of trends observed over the last 15 years. Although such numbers grab headlines, they can at best be regarded as ‘sensationalized fact’. Nevertheless, the report’s other data analyses are certainly commendable.
In deciding a country’s scoring in political empowerment of women, the WEF takes into account, among others, three variable factors — number of years with a woman as head of state, women’s presence in the cabinet, and female representation in national legislatures. Kuwait, for obvious reasons scores zero in the first of these matrices, but there is plenty of scope to improve in the other two variables, and thereby enhance political empowerment of women in the country.
The quickest way to improve Kuwait’s gender gap rankings would be for His Highness the Prime Minister to consider appointing a gender-balanced cabinet, if need be through an Amiri decree. But more than improving scores on the WEF Gender Gap index or other global indices, Kuwait needs to introduce legislations that provide not just nominal equality but substantive gender parity.
However, to implement female favorable legislations it is critical to have more female legislators in parliament. But since the heady days of 2009 when four lawmakers made their way to parliament, there has been a decline in women’s representation in the National Assembly. From the 8 percent representation of women in 2009, the number of women lawmakers has tumbled to just one woman legislator (2%) following the recent 2023 general elections.
In Kuwait, the near absence of women in parliament, in leadership roles, and in decision-making processes over the years have hindered their ability to realize their full potential, to achieve gender parity, and to strengthen their human rights.
Among factors that curtail women from realizing their full economic, social, cultural and political potential are a slew of discriminatory laws, processes and practices that create gender-biased systems and structures. Additionally, traditional social norms on gender stereotypes and attitudes confine women within boundaries.
Gender equality and political empowerment are recognized as preconditions for successful development of democracy, social integrity and pluralism, as well as for bringing about changes that benefit all of society. To achieve their political empowerment women in Kuwait will need to overcome barriers and persist in strengthening grassroots networks to drive change.
Political equality can come about only when there is equal access to political offices that enable women to legislate laws and policies tackling women’s issues. They also need to share government positions that entrust them with the power and ability to implement actions that promote an inclusive society. Waiting for this to happen in Kuwait and the wider MENA region, in a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario could well take 140 years or more as predicted in the WEF report.
It would be incredulous to expect women to wait that long to achieve what are essentially their basic rights. One option to fast-track the process of achieving political empowerment and gender parity in Kuwait, would be to consider affirmative actions such as quotas that reserve a set number of seats in parliament for women. Undoubtedly affirmative actions such as quotas are a double-edged tool that will have to be wielded with care and will need to be tweaked and adapted over time.
Affirmative actions taken should be viewed as a proactive measure to overcome centuries of traditional social systems that have helped create the institutionalized discrimination prevailing today. Additionally, quotas introduced in other countries have proven that they are a sure-fire way to effectively introduce gender parity in legislatures. Quotas also help create a more democratic and inclusive parliament without any loss in quality of legislators and legislations; in fact the opposite is true.
It is worth noting in this regard that the lone exception among GCC countries in improving its overall global rankings in the WEF report and in the sub-index of political empowerment was the United Arab Emirates. The UAE went from its earlier 112th spot in the global ranking to 24th position in 2021 largely through a sharp increase in the number of female representation in the Federal National Council, from 23 percent in 2019 to 50 percent in 2021.
This dramatic improvement was made possible by a presidential directive in 2019 from the late UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who ordered the equal representation of Emirati women in the Federal National Council. Other countries have achieved similar increases at a slower pace using a range of methods, including quotas. In fact, more than half the countries in the world now use some form of quota system to increase female representation.
In Kuwait, where equal parliamentary representation would be a more difficult proposition to achieve in a short time, perhaps the authorities could start with a minimum 30 percent representation of women in parliament. Research studies conducted by social scientists, and adopted by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (UN-DAW), reveal that women’s interests will start to be taken into public account when there are a minimum of 30 percent women representatives in parliament.
With a 30 percent representation, women were found to be strong enough to influence decision-making processes and introduce gender-sensitive laws and policies. Experiences of countries that have introduced a quota-based representation in parliament have shown that the 30 percent reservation is the minimum needed to make any meaningful changes in society.
But in Kuwait, the 30 percent reservation for women would leave male candidates with only 35 seats to occupy in the National Assembly. This will probably not sit well with many in the existing parliament, and opposition to any gender reservation is bound to arise. A viable alternative to this conundrum would be to increase the total parliamentary seats by 10 percent to 60, with the addition of two more seats per existing constituency.
Another option would be to add one more constituency of 10 parliamentary seats by redrawing boundaries of existing constituencies to include the new cities that are being developed to the north and south of Kuwait, as well as by taking into account population increases in future. In a 60-seat parliament that allocates 18 seats to women, there would still be 42 seats up for grabs by male candidates, which is a figure close to current strength of 50 seats, and hopefully one on which all lawmakers will be able to find common ground.
While the government has in recent years taken several positive steps to prioritize women’s economic empowerment through increasing their representation in public employment and promoting more women to leadership roles in various ministries and in the judiciary, these measures should only be considered as a starting point to eventually achieving gender parity in all other fields.
However, without political support for these measures in parliament, especially for political empowerment of women, it might well require the 146 years mentioned in the WEF report to achieve gender equality. Changing the prevailing status quo and bringing about gender parity is not just the responsibility of the government and parliament, it needs full buy‑in from all segments of society, including from each one of us. Are we going to wait until the year 2156, or are we willing to act now?
