The following is a post written by Vital Voices Asia Intern, Shonali Banerjee.
At 20-years-old, Bai Yitong is one of the youngest female village leaders in China. Though she is proud of her unprecedented victory in the Shaanxi Province election, she says that her duties as head of Gaojie village might be easier to address if she were a man.
In an interview with the New York Times, she stated: “Some male chiefs use violence, and it’s much quicker [to address the duties of a village chief]. As a woman, I can’t do that. But there are things that are hard to achieve if you don’t use force.”
Yitong’s experience reflects the struggle of women leaders to retain legitimacy within their electorates. On issues such as family planning, women are regarded with respect – on other issues, however, they are often viewed with reverence than male counterparts, often for their opposition to the use of violence.
While national statistics show that women’s participation in the economic and business sectors is rising, women still struggle to establish themselves in the political sphere.
Of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party’s Politburo, the nation’s most powerful decision-making body, not one is a woman. Only three of 27 government ministers are women.
Since 1997, China has dropped from 16th to 53rd place in the world rankings of female representation in parliament. Experts cite progress in other nations as the main reason for China’s dramatic drop in rankings:
“It’s not that China has gotten worse. It’s that the rest of the world has gotten better.”
Read more: Women Struggle for a Foothold in Chinese Politics -NYT
Vital Voices Global Partnership Team on July 12th 2010 in Asia, News & Current Events