Only 40 years after Swiss women gained the right to vote in national elections, the country’s cabinet of ministers contains more women than men.

The Swiss only granted women the right to vote in 1971, and now, we can see a cabinet where women outnumber the men, with four women and three men on the Federal Council. This makes Switzerland only the fifth country in the world to have a cabinet which contains more women. The ratio is of 4:3 and this is even more remarkable when one considers that so little time has elapsed between universal suffrage and the figure we are reading about today.

But it is not so simple. If one takes a good look at Swiss politics, one will see that there is some 30 per cent representation of women in Parliament and that women were only granted the right to vote in local elections by one canton (region/council) in 1990, and that was only after a ruling by the courts. So, we should not rush to laud Switzerland as the upholder of gender equality just yet. But if we then look at our own political and administrative spheres, we will see that we still lag behind in matters of female representation.

If one were to take the Maltese Cabinet, we would see that it is composed of 13 members – nine ministers, including the PM, and four parliamentary secretaries. Of these, there are only two women – Dolores Cristina and Giovanna Debono – both of whom have been in the party and the government machinery for a good number of years. In other words, there seems to be no new female blood coming through. We must also remember that Maltese women were granted the right to vote in 1947.

In fact, out of a total of 69 government MPs, there are only six women in Parliament. Two of these, the aforementioned Cristina and Debono, are on the government benches. Four sit on the opposition benches and include Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, Marlene Pullicino, Helena Dalli and Justyne Caruana. This makes up a mere 8.7 per cent of the House.

We must also take the issue into the context of European institutions. We have no Maltese members of the European Parliament who are women – there are currently five, with one observer, and not one of them is female. Granted, there were female candidates, but none of them were elected by the electorate and the field of candidates was dominated by men.

We must also look at Malta’s track record for nominations of judges to sit on the European Court of Human Rights. Malta has been chastised for repeatedly submitting nominations which do not include women. To be fair, the courts have seen a relatively high increase in the number of women who are being appointed magistrates. But this is essentially a time issue. Magistrates need a certain number of years of experience before they can be appointed judges and this is a legacy we are still dealing with today.

If we look at matters objectively, we will see that we lag very far behind in participation of women in our ‘power structures’. The PN and the PL have been pushing for women to become more involved in their administrations, and we saw the appointment of Lydia Abela as the PL’s executive secretary and Paula Mifsud Bonnici as president of the PN, but both are largely ceremonial roles when compared to the posts which men currently hold in both parties. Many will argue that it is the Maltese mentality of ‘get married, have children and settle down to run the home’. But if we continue to make such slow progress, how can we ever reach the goals set out by Vision 2015 and the Lisbon Strategy?