Susan Dalgety: Equality issue is one parliament must raise

UNTIL last year I was never a fan of mandatory quotas to secure a decent representation of women in parliament or, indeed, on a local council.

During my seven-year spell as a councillor in the 1990s I argued that women should make it on merit, not because they had benefited from a "rigged" selection process.

I reluctantly agreed that Labour's 50-50 quota system for the first elections to the Scottish Parliament had worked with nearly 40 per cent of the new MSPs women, but I was still not convinced on equality guarantees.

Then last March I went to Rwanda – the only country in the world with a majority of women in its national parliament.

There I met Soline Nyirahabimana, a government minister and one of the authors of Rwanda's 2003 constitution which guarantees by law that women are "granted at least 30 per cent of posts in decision-making organs".

She and her colleagues had had no hesitation in enforcing equality. "More than half our national resource was in the kitchen," she explained. "We needed those women to develop our country. And as our president, Paul Kagame, says, equality is 'not a favour, it is a right'."

It was a lightbulb moment. Half the world's population is female, yet there are still parliaments where no woman dare show her face. The UK Cabinet has only two women members and the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections saw a 7 per cent drop in the number of women MSPs.

The only way Scotland is going to get, and sustain, a parliament that reflects our nation is if there is equality in our democratic structures.

This view was echoed, quietly, by most of the women we interviewed for our report on the impact of women ministers during the first two terms of the Scottish Parliament.

Each one said she may not have been elected, or even considered standing for election, if the Labour party had not introduced a quota system.

And each argued that their personal experience as a woman had informed their work as a minister, leading, they believe, to more women-friendly social policies.

In January a cross-party conference chaired by House of Commons Speaker John Bercow recommended that unless the UK political parties improved their representation at the 2010 general election, then there should be obligatory quotas for the next one.

Tomorrow the world's leading women will gather in New York for the UN's summit on the status of women, where the slow progress on equality of representation will be discussed. In 1990 the UN set a target of 30 per cent women representation by 1995 and equal representation by 2000.

The latest figures from the Inter-Parliamentary Union show that, in December 2009, women held only 18.7 of the world's parliamentary seats.

Scotland's constitution has dominated our political landscape for the past two years, but nowhere in the national conversation has the topic of equality been raised.