Gender parity in the Cordoba Legislature is an objective that has never been achieved, although there have been laws in this regard for about 20 years. A study carried out by the Institute of Psychological Research, which depends on Conicet and the National University of Córdoba (UNC), reached this conclusion.
In our province, the unicameral Legislature was established in 2001, after the constitutional reform. Since then, the body consists of 70 legislators: 44 are chosen taking the provincial territory as the only district, and the remaining 26 are chosen at the rate of one for each department.
Well, here is the first part of the problem. In the sheet list that is voted on throughout the province, the parties and coalitions have had to conform to the law and reserve half of the candidacies for women. If 22 women are not elected, the proportional system is applied. But the difference, when it exists, is minimal.
The key is in the elections of departmental legislators. There is only one candidate per list. And the list that gets the most votes gets the bench. In this case, men are almost always the candidates, and it could not be said that the law is being violated because it does not establish that a party or coalition has the obligation to reserve half of those 26 candidacies for women.
The imbalance is important: when the entire Legislature is analyzed, it is observed that women have barely occupied, in the best period, 35 percent of the seats. To be graphic: a third, not half. Because, in the best of cases, barely 15 percent of the departments had female political representation. In fact, there are 11 departments that have never had a female legislator.
Now, on this basic inequality operates, over time, a second: only 17 percent of female legislators manage to renew their mandate, against 32 percent of men. In other words, a man is more likely to pursue a career in politics and stay in office.
All in all, the gender disparity reaches a third configuration within the Legislature: the authorities are men in almost all cases, and in parliamentary commissions, although there is a tendency towards a balance between genders, there is a strong thematic segmentation, so that women lead those dedicated to the rights of children and the family, the promotion of health, gender violence, social development, education and culture.
In conclusion, the laws to promote gender parity in legislative positions increased the presence of women in the Legislature, but they have not given the expected results to date because they have not been enough to transform the culture of political organizations, which tend to favor male candidacies, both for the elections themselves and later for management positions. All this shows that politics has a very marked macho bias.