Gender equality in Estonia Part 2 — closing the gap

femLENS
femLENS
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read
Source: http://www.csb.gov.lv/en/notikumi/females-decision-making-positions-equally-represented-all-three-baltic-countries-46335.html

The above illustration looks at women to men ratio in various official positions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The English text is available if you follow the link.

The interesting part for me was that the statistics on that website look at the grow in the gender balancing. So for example, in Estonia — data on 2016 indicates 32 % of ambassadors and heads of missions were female, which is a growth of 6 percentage points since 2005.

Or a 1 percent growth of females in the national police and national border guard offices for Estonia, from 33% in 2005 to 34% in 2015.

And here I find Close the Gap website a great lesson.

If you play with the data, and especially selecting “Smallest Gap” and “Parliamentary Participation” you will see that most of the countries which have the biggest political gender balance didn’t work on that balance gradually, but practically did it overnight and kept on doing it!

Source: http://closethegap.studiometric.co/

Equality doesn’t need to be a long painful process. The resources — women, are already there. Governments don’t need to invest into research, focus groups, investment plans to bring about gender equality, they need to pass the laws that make it the national ethical, moral and legal goal.

P.S.

So I don’t seem completely biased, that page has an interesting bit of info — 71% of the Estonian prosecutor’s office workers in 2015 were female, which hasn’t changed in the last decade. I wonder what explains these numbers.

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