I am a member of the liberal party of the Ukrainian SSR and a co-founder of the internal project “Women in Politics”. We started this project together with two colleagues from the diaspora, Roxana Wilka and Oana Duma, when we noticed that the USR-PLUS alliance did not propose a woman to the government formed in December 2020. The fact that the two reformist parties, which are considered to be pro-European, were voted mainly by educated and urban voters in Romania, failed to nominate a single woman for one of the six portfolios they received after negotiations with the PNL, was a disappointment.

In the year and a half since I started the project, I have had countless discussions with my fellow party members to diagnose the problem and find solutions. My travel partners included representatives of the Naumann Foundation in Romania, with whom I published research Representation of women in Romanian politics and we organized debates with politicians from both our party and outside it. A constant point of these debates was that the time allocated to the discussion always seemed to be insufficient: a sign that the topic was of interest and worth discussing.

What scares us about measures to promote women in politics?

If you say phrases like “equal opportunity” or “more women in politics,” the first two lines will include 90% of the time the myth of meritocracy and the form of reductio ad Dăncilă (which has replaced Elena Ceausescu in the collective consciousness, used until recently as a motivation for why we don’t have more women in politics).

In Romania, we vote for closed lists in local, parliamentary and European elections. Although in reality all they do is choose between lists of different parties, which used to establish the order within the parties, many Romanians live with the illusion of meritocratic choice, or at least the desirability of it. Is there meritocratic selection in parties? It is enough to look at the resumes of our parliamentarians to find the answer.

Moreover, a closer look at internal party dynamics indicates that, as with government nominations, their leadership has an important say when it comes to who is eligible for office and who is not. And since the leadership of all the parties in Romania is dominated by men, it is perhaps not a coincidence that they tend to elect all men to the relevant positions. Elite reproduction theory is well known in political science and explains why leaders tend to favor people who look like them. Another explanatory factor is the major role that socialization plays in creating support networks within the party, and the fact that there is still a segregation of socialization between women and men, especially after the birth of children.

It is important to note that democracy does not begin with the premise of meritocratic selection, as in the Mandarin system. Representation is one of her wishes, and since the society consists of 51% women, their absence from parliament can be seen as a shortcoming of Romanian democracy. Even after the above clarifications, I want to emphasize a fact that should be obvious, namely that removing the informal barriers that make it difficult for women to advance in politics will lead to a larger selection base for political elites and therefore more competition .

The argument I called “reductio ad Dancila” is based on this hasty generalization: if we had a woman prime minister and she did not “live up to expectations”, there is no need to promote more women into politics (since it is understood that they will all be ineffective). Interestingly, the long line of men who served as prime minister without much competence or results did not lead to the same generalization in the mirror about men. Basically, a “reductio ad Dăncilă” type argument. aa form of double standards as for women in politics (and often outside of it): they have to be impeccable politicians, because they are instantly punished for any wrong move. And from here to the generalization about all women is only one step. Women politicians are much more likely to be attacked and insinuated about their personal (especially intimate) lives than men, and we have already witnessed moments when mothers are told that their political participation is illegitimate because they have to take care of children. In the most serious forms, such behavior leads to physical and verbal threats against female politicians[1].

The vicious circle of alienation and its consequences. Do Romanian women have a “political vocation”?

At the beginning of the project, I mostly heard from my male colleagues that there are no obstacles to the involvement and advancement of women in politics. To explain the numbers (18% women in parliament, 5% women mayors, 1(o) single minister), some told us that Romanian women have no “political vocation”, others that women lack courage. However, they did not know how to explain this seemingly strange anomaly, which puts us at the bottom of all European rankings when it comes to the representation of women in politics, especially since women on average outperform men in higher education.

It is clear that fewer women are entering politics (incomplete data suggest that in the EDR women make up a maximum of 30% of the membership), and it is undeniable that there are sometimes not enough women to claim leadership positions both within and within the party. and beyond it.

But why does this happen? There are many reasons, they intertwine and reinforce each other. We are socialized and socialized by young children in an environment where, if we watch TV, the politicians we see are heterosexual Romanian men over 40. We inevitably associate the idea of ​​a politician with such a profile. Additionally, environments that are so male-dominated tend to become aggressive and/or value masculine traits as defining a good leader. To adapt and survive in this world, many women masculinize their behavior. From the sidelines, or even after you’ve taken the first step toward civic and/or political participation, what are the chances that such an environment will appeal to you as a woman? Read the rest of the article on Contributors.ro