Women participation in elections encouraging
By Mona Khan

ISLAMABAD—Significant women’s participation in election was concrete step towards creating overall gender equality in politics.This time, women have secured not only the reserved seats but also contested and won general seats to reach Parliament.
Fifteen women secured seats of the National Assembly, 11 from Punjab and four belonged to Sindh province. While nine women bagged seats of provincial Assemblies, two from Sindh and seven from Punjab. This would help involving women in decision making mechanism.
The Assessment Report on Election-2008 produced by The Researchers (TR), a non-governmental organization told that all major parties gave space to women issues in their manifestos.
ANP has focused legislation to create the affirmative space by ratifying international hints at micro credit, whereas PML-Q and MQM were more generic in their focus.
On an average, 75% of political parties have supported their women candidates in election campaigning by helping them in arranging and supporting election activity.
Aazar Ayaz Executive Director, TR sharing the facts gathered from research revealed that the average age of the women contesting candidates was between 35-40 years. The education level categorized as high as almost 50% of women were Masters, 75% were categorized as affluent while 60% constituents were receptive to women’s role in politics.
He also highlighted the positive steps of ECP including availability of voter lists, details of polling stations,information material for observers, guidelines and election processes related materials and election complaint data on its website.
Analysing the voter interviews after visiting polling stations, The Researchers highlighted the facts that PPPP was able to bag women sympathy votes more post Mrs. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. PML-N however gained from anti PML-Q votes as crisis and inflation dejected the voters from PML-Q.
It is also noticeable that several women candidates switched over their party. The most prominent switchers among the previously elected women were Hina Rabbani Khar, Firdous Aashiq Awan, Sughra Imam switched from PML-Q to PPPP, whereas Shehzadi Umerzadi Tiwana joined PML-N leaving PML-Q.
Abida Hussain switched from her independant party to PPPP and Dr. Saira Tariq, minority reserved seat, joined PML-Q from PPPP.
The women party switchers were more on the basis of development of differences with their earlier especially for Hina Rabbani Khar, Firdous Aashiq Awan and Umerzadi Tiwana, the research told.
The research told that ample security was provided to voters and their attitude was cooperative, while the vote count was largely intimidation free, transparent and cooperative.
On the basis of their observation, the report suggested that ECP must start efforts to clean and update the data so that duplicate entries and missing women and youth in data can be added to list before Local Government 2009 elections.