One of the central challenges in modern democracies is integrating women’s interests, voices and women as representatives in decision making. Today, women comprise 14 per cent of parliamentarians worldwide, and are even more poorly represented in senior decision making positions in political and public life.

Women have evolved many strategies to combat their economic, social and political disempowerment. In collective form, they focus on bringing about gender-balanced and gender-responsive forms of governance, including quotas, mainstreaming and positive actions. These strategies and practices have been adapted to meet differing cultural contexts. At the same time, the discourses of equality and human rights informing these initiatives have come to prominence in international conceptions of democracy. The task of the new century is to support the development of gender-responsive democracies so that women’s contribution to public and political life is given full expression and value. Some of the issues addressed in this event include:

• SMART strategies for getting women into decision-making
• women’s leadership styles
• gender mainstreaming: gender-sensitive budgeting
• engendering transitions.

Participant profile
This event brings together men and women from politics, higher echelons of administration and academia along with senior post-holders in public and private decision making. The event themes are chosen to foster exchanges of practice, experience and theoretical knowledge, enriching the understanding of participants and facilitating problem-solving discussions on strategies for engendering democracy.

This seminar is highly interactive, aimed at sharing experience, practice and theory among senior persons in politics, government, academia, non-governmental organisations and the media. The thread uniting this high-level group is a concern with bringing women’s interests, perspectives and voices into senior decision-making in public and political arenas.