CEP Sisters at the UN
Women in Politics
The moderator raised a very interesting point at the beginning of the session, women represent 19.5 percent worldwide of parliamentarians, there is more progress in lower house's of parliament and in countries that have 50 percent or more of women politicians these countries have some form of proportional representation or quotas.
This emphasizes what the labour movement and social democratic parties in Canada has been saying and lobbying for.
The representatives presenting included two MP's one from Spain and from the UK, along with a representative from iknowpolitics. The presenters discussed the increased use of social media in their roles as MP's, along with traditional email and websites, the use of blogs, Facebook and twitter. They emphasized the wide reaching audience of social media. Social media can be used an internal knowledge network for women in politics, for information and knowledge sharing. There was a discussion about linking elected women with young women interested in politics and the effectiveness of social media to be used in mentoring women to become involved.
In the UK Parliament all of the committees have twitter accounts and approximately 50 percent use social media and that number increases every day. Interesting of that 50 percent using social media, only 2 percent use Facebook the others are using twitter. The MP from Spain emphasized that new information and communications technology (NICT) constitute a fundamental tool in almost all areas of life, opening a broad window to the world allowing us to communicate, inform others, improve business relationships, open new markets and to become part of the information society.
The representative from iknowpolitics identified that ICT is being used to conquer the political space. Examples were given of young women and activists using social media, by simply sending out a tweet, you can inspire people to join your cause, your rally, your event. She stated that "democracy is not imported it comes from within."
Issues raised during the question and answer included accessibility to networks and wireless another strength of the broadband, especially in rural and remote areas.
In Canada the telecommunications Act speaks to universal accessibility and this is current challenge that within the Labour movements continue to lobby for is the universal accessibility of broadband width. Similar in many other countries companies make the infrastructure investments in large urban centres and are much slower and almost reluctant to invest in rural and remote communities.
Training and education as well as literacy was also identified as impediments to the expansion of ICT usage.
Barb Dolan
CEP Ontario Region Administrative Vice President
