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A Constitutional Amendment For Women Essay

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Into parliament. In Bangladesh there had been a provision, which expired in 2000, to reserve 10% of seats for women in parliament. This expiry resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of female legislators. A constitutional amendment in 2001 extended women‟s reserved seats from 30 to 45 for a period of 10 years. Prior to this, the reserved seats of 30 enacted in 1978 were about the only route for women into parliament. In 1996, 11 or 3.6% of the seats in the first post the post system was won by women. In 2001 this dropped to 6 or only 2% of the seats in parliament. In 2005, a law increased the overall number of seats in parliament, and 45 of these were reserved for women. These were allocated to political parties on the share of the national vote received in the elections, and the number of women increased to 13% of the seats in the 2005 elections, and in 2008 this increased to 18.6%. In Bangladesh, 19 women won out of the 300 constituency seats, to join 45 appointed women members. The number of women holding ministerial portfolios has never exceeded 3%. As of 2009, nearly 80% of parliamentary standing committees have no women. With the addition of the 45 reserved seats in November 2009, women are now 14.8% of the total positions. Begum has commented: “The mode of nomination for reserving seats lies exclusively with political parties. A woman selected from the reserved quota has to represent an area more than ten times larger than those of the general seats. The women

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