Gender-equal representatives
KIM Seok-hyeon.
first upoaded: 2020-03-05.
last updated: 2020-12-31.
More and more countries have been concerned about gender equality in the board of the corporation, resulting with some countries' legislation of more gender equality in the sexes of the board members, following after Norway that legislated the gender quota of 40% in the corporation in 2006. If this quota system is not a bad idea, then why not try it on all the levels of election for official representatives. If the corporation board, which is assumed more as a private domain than the elected representatives, should be believed to comply with the gender quota, then the elected representatives on public domain should be even more strongly believed to be gender-equal.
In order to make elected representatives gender-equal, each electoral district has to be made up of the two leagues: one league for one sex. That is, candidates are competing with those of the same sex. If the existing electoral district system is supposed to pick only one, then each of the revised electoral district systems has to pick one male and one female. Then the number of the representatives after the change depends on the adjustments of electoral districts. If they want to keep the same electoral districts, then the number of representatives will be doubled. If they want to keep the number unchanged, then for example, they have to consolidate adjacent two electoral districts to one. If an existing electoral district is supposed to choose two representatives such as the US Senate (two senators for each state as a senate electoral district), then in the new system the two should be just man and woman. If the existing electoral district chooses more than two, then in the new system the number of representatives should be adjusted to just an even one for equal number of men and women.
As for South Korea's National Assembly, an unicameral legislature, the rationale stands good for the two-league electoral districts. The number of electoral districts for the National Assembly is 253 as of the latest one (20th), while the number of elementary local governments is 226 as of the latest. This means that there are more than one national representative for each constituency of elementary local government. In the US, the number of congressional districts is 435 lately but the number of counties or county equivalents which are subdivisions of each state is 3,192. So very roughly 7 countries form one congressional district. And each congressional district has seven hundred thousand people. In contrast, each of South Korea's electoral districts for the National Assembly has about just two hundred thousand. So there is a large room for the expansion of the electoral district for the National Assembly while keeping the representatives the same. And the smaller size of South Korea provides further rationale for the enlargement of each electoral district. So the rationale is solid, though implementation may face challenges as always and anywhere else.
(*) This article is published in intelligence korea, Summer and Winter, 2020. The Korean version is available at intelligencekor.kr/periodical/article.html?bno=11.
