Women On Top:Women as leaders and voters

Article first published on Technorati(http://technorati.com/women/article/women-on-top/)

Today, as everyone is heading for the booth to cast their vote, I was struck by a thought.

Is a woman equally accepted as a voter and a representative of country or state all over the world, today in 2010?

The term is Woman Suffrage. This is the right of women to vote and run for office. In 1906,Finland became the first nation to grant full suffrage to all citizens including women. Newzealand was however the first to grant all its citizens the right to vote in 1893,but women got the right to run the Newzealand legislature only in 1919.

At this moment there are 31 female leaders in 28 different countries or self-ruling territories.

Though there had always been female rulers(we know about the Egyptian Queens of 3000BC),it is also true that not until during and after the World War I that the first few women became members of the revolutionary governments in Ukraine, Russia, Hungary and Ireland. Nina Bang, Danish Minister of Education 1924-26, was the first woman to be minister in democratically elected Parliamentary Government.

The First elected female heads of the country, however, came from the Indian subcontinent. In 1960, Sirivamo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka became the first female elected Prime Minister followed by the formidable Indira Gandhi in India in 1966.

At this moment, there are reigning Queens in 3 countries: Denmark, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom - and the latter is represented by female Governor Generals in 3 countries; Antigua and Barbuda, Australia and Saint Lucia. They function as their countries' de-facto Heads of State.
At the moment there are 11 woman Prime Ministers; in Australia, Bangladesh, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Slovakia and Trinidad and Tobago and in the self-governing territories of Bermuda, Sint Maartin and the Åland Islands.
The 10 female Presidents are in Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland, India, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Lithuania and Switzerland - and in the Federation of Bosnia within Bosnia-Herzegovina.However, the Presidents are often just a position with little actual power as in Switzerland and India.

But the list of female Presidents has now a new member with the election of Dilma Rousseff as Brazilian head of state late on Sunday.

So Latin America now has 3 ,Europe leads with 5,Asia 2 and Africa has 1 female Presidents.

We feel proud as women when we see this statistics.

But on the other side of the coin there are still countries like Saudi Arabia or Lebanon where women still don’t have full suffrage.

In US, Congress passed what became, when it was ratified in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment which prohibited state and federal agencies from gender-based restrictions on voting. Suffrage was extended to women in France by the 21 April 1944 ordinance of the French Provisional government though "Indigenous Muslim" women in French Algeria had to wait until a 3 July 1958 decree.

What is however striking in this statistics is that the great propagators of Freedom and Liberty and Equality, the USA and France still don’t have a female President.

Segolene Royal, a former environment minister has however shaken up French politics with her grassroots campaign and has won the overwhelming backing of the main opposition Socialist Party in her bid to become the country's first female president.

 Let’s see when we can add these two great nations in our list of First Female Presidents of the world