2014-04-14 14.03.03Catherine has secured a Westminster Hall debate today (25th June) on ‘Gender equality in parliaments and political corruption’, in her capacity as co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Corruption. This blog has been published on the PoliticsHome website ahead of the debate.

What a country chooses to tax can vary wildly. But none has gone so far as taxing birth. Yet according to reports, in a rural hospital in Zimbabwe petty corruption faced by labouring mothers effectively does just that: women must pay $5 every time they scream in pain.

It’s a shocking and hopefully isolated case. But it does point to some important questions about international corruption. How does gender affect people’s experience of graft? And crucially, if there is any disparity could this suggest ways to prevent the problem?

Various research projects have looked at the different ways corruption impacts women in developing countries compared to men. As they remain the primary caregivers, women tend to face more corruption because of their increased interaction with public services, whether trying to secure a secondary school place for their child, supporting a relative through the health system or obtaining legal documents for the family.

However, recent reports suggest the experience of many women facing corruption goes beyond the traditional gendered-spheres. In one study the major problems were around trying to start businesses. There have also been suggestions that as more women access higher education, there is an increasing convergence of sexual harassment and academic corruption. When I visited Kenya with aid agency CAFOD this year I saw for myself the damaging impact corruption has on women’s everyday lives.

Interestingly though, the gendered nature of this issue could also offer a solution. A report by the UN Development Programme suggests those who face corrupt officials the most often also develop the most effective techniques to deal with them. Some relatively simple projects to bring together groups of women facing this problem have seen marked success. Just by joining together, women empower each other through sharing experiences, comparing successful techniques and training their peers to deal with local corrupt officials.

This so-called ‘bottom-up’ approach is also being complemented by ‘top-down’ projects that look at the role of women in politics and senior leadership positions. Could empowering women at a national level likewise help deal with international graft? A range of research is emerging to suggest that women in democratic states are less likely to take or condone the taking of bribes, while some cross-country data suggests corruption is less severe where women hold a larger share of parliamentary seats and are better represented at senior government levels.

The Global Organisation of Parliamentarians Against Corruption recently released a paper that looked at the correlation between the gender make-up of legislatures and their efforts to combat corruption. Again, in states with strong democratic institutions there was a positive relationship.

Today I’m holding a debate in Parliament to highlight these reports and their implications. I want to push up the agenda the relationship between empowering women and corruption – an issue of particular importance to me as co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption – and press the Government to see what more the

UK can be doing, in light of these reports, to tackle corruption globally.

Kenya is often held up as one African country leading the way in terms of female representation, following its constitutional reforms in 2010 which stipulate that no more than two-thirds of any appointed or elected body can be of the same gender. But even so, data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks Kenya 92nd out of 189 in terms of the proportion of women sitting in its lower house (the National Assembly) – where they hold just 67 of 350 seats.

Indeed, I recently met with a delegation of Kenyan women MPs who were here in Parliament as part of a week-long visit with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. We spoke for over an hour about their experiences as women politicians in a still very much male-dominated culture, and about the struggles they still face, despite their constitutional changes and notable steps forward, to sustain this progress and secure truly equal representation. They pointed out, for example, that there is a motion in their Upper House, the Senate, to be debated in the coming weeks calling for a number of Parliamentary seats for women to be scrapped, citing costs savings as the motivation.

Of course, while we lament the fact that women hold only 19% of seats in Kenya’s National Assembly, we mustn’t forget that we have some way to go ourselves in our own Parliament. In the House of Commons, we hold just 22.6% of Parliamentary seats – ranking 74th in the world. In fact, the Kenyan MPs I recently met pointed out that they now have six women in cabinet posts – including defence and foreign affairs – and are seeing more women taking high-ranking positions than ever before, whether it is on committees, in their parliament or civil service.

This, in contrast to the three female full members of the current Coalition Government’s cabinet, the fifth of FTSE 100 boardroom executives who are women, and the lack of women in key economic and financial decision-making positions, only partially rectified by the appointment of Nemat Shafik and Kristin Forbes to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee this Spring.

This comparison drives home the fact that, on the whole, we appear to have gone backwards rather than forwards in this Parliament when it comes to women at the top of Government and elsewhere.

While there’s no silver bullet in questions as complex as corruption, the power of networking and empowering women both at grassroots and senior leadership positions should not be underestimated. Women still remain outsiders to many of the traditional corridors of power – whether in local public service provision or national legislatures – but it’s often outsiders who are willing to challenge the status quo and blow the whistle when needed.

As a female parliamentarian I’ve seen how women champion issues that impact other women and as Co-Chair of a cross-party group committed to combating corruption, I’m aware of the many steps we can take to tackle this problem. There’s no doubt in my mind that when we combine efforts on each front, we will make much greater gains in both.

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