The President of India Pranab Mukherjee will inaugurate the meet in the Central Hall of Parliament House.
The Meeting is being jointly organized by the Parliament of India and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).
Vice-President of India and the Chairman of Rajya Sabha Mohd. Hamid Ansari, Lok Sabha Speaker Mrs Meira Kumar, Members of Parliament and other dignitaries will attend the inaugural ceremony.
While the main theme of the Meeting is ‘Gender-sensitive Parliaments’, there will be a follow-up session on maternal, newborn and child health (Bern declaration). The meeting will conclude by adopting of an Outcome Document.
Keynote speeches will be given by the Secretary-General of the IPU Mr. Anders B. Johnsson and UN Women Executive Director Michelle Ms. Bachelet on Gender Sensitive Parliaments, Women and Democracy.
The Meeting will tackle a key challenge in the world of politics. With women accounting for only one in five MPs in the world when they represent 50 per cent of the global population, the issue of increasing women’s political representation remains as significant as ever. Women in leadership positions within Parliament are even fewer. Only 13.5 per cent of Speakers of Parliaments are women.
Participants will examine how to effect change on the issue and make Parliaments gender sensitive. This includes not only looking at measures on increasing women’s representation but also on changing the working methods, structures and culture of Parliaments to ensure that women and gender issues are at the heart of decision-making and policies.
The annual Meeting of Women Speakers of Parliaments is organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union to provide to women Speakers of Parliament a forum to exchange ideas and experiences on gender issues which are of interest to national and international agendas. The idea is premised on the notion that women need to be in Parliaments in order to ensure that the laws are made by both women and men and that democracy cannot be effective if half of the world’s population is not equally represented.
The first meeting of Women Speakers of Parliament was held in 2005 with an aim to create a platform where the Women Speakers of Parliament could share their views on gender-equality issues and build consensus on bringing these issues in the parliamentary agenda of their respective Parliaments.
The second meeting on “Gender Equality on the Legislative Agenda: The role of women presiding over parliaments’ was organized in 2006. The third meeting was held on 2 March, 2007 in New York on the theme ‘the role of women Speakers of Parliament in protecting and empowering the girl-child-the next generation of women’.
The fifth meeting was held in Vienna, Austria in July 2009 to discuss the challenges of achieving gender equality and meeting Millennium Development Goal 3. The Sixth meeting was held in Bern, Switzerland in July, 2010 on the theme the challenges faced in achieving gender equality and in particular in achieving Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 on child survival and maternal health.