International Women’s Day should serve as starting point to stop
the slide of women’s political participation and rights in Albania
Tirana Times Editorial
TIRANA, March 8 – It’s International Women’s Day, March 8, as this newspaper is about to go to press, a day that in Albania is also marked as Mother’s Day. Beyond best wishes for this special day, which are abundant in most Albanian families, we would like to use this occasion to urge our community of readers to help increase women’s rights and political participation in Albania. Stronger participation of women in society make a society healthier and will make Albania better.
The current numbers are discouraging. Only 16 percent of the Albanian parliament is made of women. In local governments, less than 1 percent of mayors are women.
The sad part is that Albania has gone backward since the introduction of a pluralistic system two decades ago. The country is well below EU and UN standards when it comes to women’s representation. The representation that is already there should also go beyond token representatives which hold no real power or that use the same tactics that a very strong man leader would. Women should participate and compete for true leadership of parties and institutions. And they should do so by bringing a smarter, softer debate to the toxic Albanian political scene, not by adding to it.
And it’s not that Albanian women don’t have the needed smarts and skills. Research released this week also points out that Albanian women are more educated on average than the men and yet in the public administration there are male employees than women. The numbers don’t even add up in the education and health sectors where women have been historically dominant.
Where evolution to a modern society doesn’t happen naturally, it might need a nudge with temporary policies that favor women.
But before anything else there are couple of health issues that need addressing. Health data for women in Albania is very discouraging. Maternal mortality is extremely high, research released this week indicates. The European average is that five women lose their lives during birth per 100,000, while in Albania there are 31 mothers that lose their lives during pregnancy or during birth per 100,000.
Albania also paradoxically has more baby boys born each year than baby girls. The current rate is 112 boys to 100 girls, leading Council of Europe to urge Albania to put in efforts to investigate and stop gender-selective abortion. Albanian culture has always had a preference for boys, but it has never practiced gender-selective abortions in the past. Technology has now clearly made it possible and abortion is legal in Albania, so the opportunity is there to use it. Such practice it is barbaric and against the European values to which Albania aspires. Laws should be put in place to discourage it.
Some doctors have argued that the disparity relates to the fact that many couples don’t have a second child if their firstborn is a baby boy, but nonetheless there should be a full investigation to see if sex-selective abortions are taking place.
