The National Commission for the Promotion of Equality welcomes the steps taken by the Labour Party to address the low participation of women in the political sphere and to increase the number of women candidates in its electoral lists.

It hoped that all political parties in Malta would adopt initiatives aimed at enabling the participation of women in politics and said it was ready to assist in implementing programmes and other measures that seek to address this democratic deficit.

Labour’s LEAD programme, unveiled earlier this month, aims to ensure that by 2027 half the candidates contesting the Labour Party electoral lists are women.

To achieve this goal the programme seeks to recruit and mentor women who are interested in political participation.

The NCPE said it considered such programmes an important step towards gender equality since they were based on a recognition that women faced historical and structural barriers to achieve their full and equal participation in different spheres, including politics.

The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women termed this as “the historical imbalance of power between women and men in society”.

The NCPE said the ultimate impact of such barriers was a flawed democracy where half of the population was heavily under-represented. Thus, proactive measures were needed to address deep rooted factors that led to gender inequality in political representation.

Programmes that actively sought to recruit and train women to participate in the political sphere were a pre-requisite to ensure that both sexes were equally represented in the political decision-making processes of society.