According to a research report “Women’s Political Participation in Myanmar”, by The Asian Foundation and a Myanmar NGO Phan Tee Eain, female politicians in Myanmar are actually better educated than male politicians.[i] Yet it is difficult for women to advance in politics.  In the same report, women politicians mention lack of confidence as one of their major problems. Something needs to be done about this.

In many countries political parties have special Women’s Wings (WW), open only to women members of that particular party. In WWs women can discuss, they can learn to take the responsibility of chairing, they have an opportunity to gender mainstream the policies of the party and then take these ideas to the whole party platform. A Women´s Wing can be a forum for learning how to do politics. But it can and it should also be a platform for emotional development. According to the above mentioned research report by The Asia Foundation and Phan Tee Eain, lack of solidarity between women who are active in politics is a big problem in Myanmar. If the WW of your party is the well-functioning, sisterly organization that a good WW aims to be, then you can, in its supportive atmosphere, learn to trust other women and to cooperate with them.

To function well, a WW should be an integral part of the party: it should have representation in the decision-making bodies of the party and it should serve as a platform to raise in the party hierarchy. In some countries wives or sisters of party leaders are chairpersons of the WW. This is not democratic: only merit of one’s own must be the base of selection.

There is also a wider picture. When active women, who want to bring about change in their own communities, in their cities and countries, in their regions and in the whole world, come together e.g. in big United Nations conferences to meet and discuss policies to change things for better, they usually cooperate in a wonderful way. After the conference ends, they go back to their homes, to their own parliaments, and stop cooperation. They step back inside their silos and start seeing other women from other parties as competitors, or as enemies.

The fact is that with cooperation over party lines they could achieve much more. If there is a topic that all women in your parliament/your council care about, e.g. domestic violence against women (VAW) or human trafficking, or sexual harassment, and women want to change legislation or allocate more money to deal with the problem, then it is really important to learn to reach over to other women, across party lines. This is much easier in a multiparty system than in a parliament with only two parties. In such parliaments the threshold for women to reach over the party line is much, much higher.