Last week Finland found a potent ambassador for gender equality when 34-year-old Social Democrat #SannaMarin was sworn in as prime minister, heading a coalition and a cabinet dominated by women.
She is the youngest serving premier in the world (Jacinda Ardern is 39), mother to a toddler, and heads a coalition of four other parties that are all led by women. Three of them, like her, are under 40.
These women are all brilliant role models for the women and girls of today.
But we need many more.
Because when you look at the stats, we can’t see enough women at the top.
▶️ Women currently lead just 12 of 195 countries worldwide. 🌏🤷🏻♀️
▶️ As of September 2018 the International Parliamentary Union ranks Australia down at 50th in the world on its Women in National Parliament tally. (We sit just above South Sudan and just below the Philippines.) 👎🏽🤷🏽♀️
▶️ Only 28.7 percent of seats in the House of Representatives are occupied by women and only 6 out of 23 Cabinet posts.🏫🤷🏿♀️
▶️ And despite the fact that Australia is one of the world's oldest continuous democracies and has held 47 federal elections since 1901, we have had only ONE female prime minister - Julia Gillard, who served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia and Leader of the Australian Labor Party from 2010 to 2013.
The good news is an increasing number of Australians are calling for institutional interventions: be they gender quotas, targets, education initiatives, party preselection rules, or electoral reform.
But we need to do much more to shift the dial, level the playing field, make our democracy truly representative, and create more pipelines for women and girls to participate in politics and parliament.
We’d love to hear what’s working for you, or what we can all do to bring the numbers up.
Please comment below.👇🏽