A three-day conference entitled Global Forum of Women Political Leaders began on Monday in the Philippines. Participants will prepare strategies aimed at the United Nations to drastically change politics and increase the number of women in political power.
According to Pippa Norris, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, women accounted for only eleven percent of world parliamentarians in the 1970s, twelve percent in the 1980s and thirteen percent in the 1990s. With the percentage of women political leaders growing by just one percent per decade, the Global Forum is encouraging women to assume responsibility for their own equality, exchange information with one another and take “guns, goon and gold out of politics.”
“It seems that it is only when women take matters into their own hands that they are able to secure their rights and privileges as full human beings,” stated Former Philippine President Corazon Aquina in an address to the conference.
