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Political Parity among Women and Men

Parity Democracy, or PARITOCRACY

A democracy is a polity where citizenship is understood to be as important as leadership, where the voluntary worker is as highly valued as the paid official. Paritocracy occurs when women and men become true partners in citizenship and leadership, sharing equal responsibilities in government and administration, parliament and political parties, the judiciary and the media, and over public revenue and expenditure.

Parity democracy (democratie paritaire) is an end in itself, to bring to bear on public affairs the intelligence and creativity, the courage and integrity, the kindness and compassion, and the enthusiasm and industry of both halves of humankind. It is also a means to a world where every girl, as well as every boy, from Afghanistan to ex-Zaire, receives adequate nutrition, secondary education, and the expectation of gainful employment and an independent income; to a world where women and girls enjoy freedom from violence and from the fear of violence; and a world where elderly women and widows, both old and young, enjoy their full human rights.

The Council for Parity Democracy was founded as Women & Men by Raymond Lloyd in Rome on 8 March 1980. In 1986 I began working out of London, in 1991 from Westminster, at 19 Mulready House, Herrick Street, London SW1P 4JL tel + 44 20 7834 1309 email shequality@gmail.com. Since 1997, the Council has published a monthly newsletter, The Parity Democrat (ISSN 1367-6946), uploaded from Issue No 1 of January 1997 onward. There are some 700 downloadable text files on this site, from 1 to 118 pages, representing 29 years of fulltime voluntary research. It may be easier to save large files to disk, before opening them. Narratives were in Times 11 font, but since 2009 have been in Verdana 10, a font created to be read more easily on computer monitors. Tabulations remain in Courier New 8 font, both narratives and tables in Microsoft Word (.doc) format. The whole site is currently 100 MB in size, and may be downloaded free with a website copier such as the 3.4 MB HTTrack-3.43-2, freeware downloadable from www.httrack.com. Indeed I would encourage friends and readers both to download it for its unique databases, and to update it every few weeks.

More recently, to illustrate narratives of work and travel, recounted in monthly issues of The Parity Democrat, I have uploaded on to a separate site, at http://shequality.spaces.live.com, some 5000 photos, in 200 albums, taken on journeys to Austria, Belgium, Cambodia, China, Finland, France, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Moldova, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, the USA and Wales, some 35 of the 220 states and territories I have visited in my lifetime to promote development, democracy and women's advancement . The present site incorporates some ten unique promotional databases, still in part to be uploaded, comprising

3000 major anniversaries of the democracies, annually, to 2020
1000 anniversaries of women's empowerment, annually, to 2010
6000 centenaries of distinguished women of history, annually, to 2057
2900 birthdays of distinguished living women from 180 countries
600 current heads of state and other women leaders in 220 countries
300 past heads of state and other women leaders
5000 able women proposed as heads of international bodies
500 flowers and wines named after distinguished women
500 coins and banknotes portraying women, and
2100 press questions on democracy and women's empowerment

The following pages show an evolution in my work over the past fifty years in both substance and form. My work for democracy began in 1956 when I flew to Vienna to volunteer for the International Red Cross relief operation on behalf of Hungarians fleeing soviet communism. Subsequent work for Algerians taking refuge from European colonialism showed that the refugees were often better off materially than their host populations in Morocco and Tunisia. In 1961 therefore I began working for third world development, only to find in the 1970s that much modernization made women worse off, as men received machinery and credit while women were left with drudgery and subsistence. I then began the first international programme for rural women's advancement, financing it with the first world coin issue in monetary history. But by 1980 I realized that the UN system, through which I worked, had become as unaccountable as the100 of its 150 member governments which imprisoned, tortured or murdered their civilian opponents. At the age of 45 I resigned to work on my own, both for women's empowerment more generally, and for the restoration of democracy and political integrity to the international community.

I have long realized that the substance of such work would bring neither acknowledgement nor appreciation, so the past three decades have been those of finding ways in which I could get across my suggestions. This first entailed building up databases of Democracy, Distinguished Women, and Women Leaders (see Navigation Panel at left), on which I could make my Proposals. In 1980 these went first in circular letters to foreign ministers, UN agency heads, central banks and postal administrations, none of which letters have yet been posted. In 1987 I began work on some 128 individual letters to citizens and leaders in the democracies, the last 28 of which, and 10 earlier, are on the Letters page. From 1994 on I have spent more time on some 200 Conference Papers, outlining research proposals on democracy and women's advancement, for almost every major meeting I attended. And since 1998 I have persisted with Questions at these and other meetings, based on suggestions made earlier, particularly on how anniversaries and centenaries can be used to consolidate and enhance democracy and women's advancement, or promote lustration and reconciliation.

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