since you started with the legislative upper house, I somehow overread that your reference was with regard to governments, not parliaments and other legislative bodies.

So you are correct!

But at least this mistake has brought up some interesting data…

Here you can compare the female memberships of governments in 2008.

Sorry, Julien, but they did, and the figures that you quoted do not contradict that fact.

Read closely: I was speaking of _governments_, not the legislatures. And in countries with unicameral legislatures, cabinets usually take care of those matters which elsewhere might be considered as the purview of the “upper houses”. That’s why I brought it up.

Granted, Spain does actually have an upper house, so that may not be the comparison that Douglas was looking for. But well, what was the issue? The proportional position of women in government institutions in general, or the proportional position of women only in upper houses of bicameral legislatures on the state level in federal systems?

The first one sounds like worth a discussion to me, the second one sounds like deliberately zeroing in on a somewhat peculiar detail, for reasons that at least I would not understand.

Or were you questioning the factuality of my comment that most EU countries – which was presumably what Douglas intended when speaking of this uncapitalized “euro-land” – do not have federal governments or bicameral legislatures?

Sorry, but once again, there was nothing incorrect in my statement. As Douglas has already noted, the IPU, whose website you quoted, recognizes only twelve bicameral legislatures within the EU, of twenty-seven members. That’s a minority, and in the future, that proportion is likely to decrease as new member states are accepted.

As for federal forms of government, the EU has exactly three member states with federal forms of government. Plus, if we want to include also strange outliers, the EU is also ruling over one satrapy with a federal form of government.

And there are some unitary member states which have granted a degree of autonomy to some parts of the country – strangely enough, this would be once again one of those features which Finland and Spain seem to share in common.

(Sadly, the provincial legislature of Åland still has a female minority, so they don’t really compare with New Hampshire.)

By the way, I’m getting the feeling that you should perhaps consider changing the name of this forum.

Cheers,

J. J.

Wether that’s comparable or not, I can’t tell. The New Hampshire State Senators are presumably all directly elected, but running a ministry is probably a more important job.

And of course a majority of the government is different from a majority of the chamber. No big points to make here; just interested. (And New Hampshire’s lower house has 400 members from a population of about 1.3 million, another outlier.)

http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm

is not correct, Jussi.