The population of women in Georgia

Diana PETRIASHVILI
Georgia Today n/p, 2001

The population of women in Georgia is up to 58 %. And only 6 % of Georgian parliamentarians are women. Here we have 18 ministers and only two of them are women.  This is not fair, is it? According to the various data, women are not only as well educated as men, but oftentimes they are even more skilled and erudite. It is known that 842 of every 10 thousand able-bodied Georgian women have university degrees. The corresponding index for Georgian men is only 560. Traditionally at the most higher education institutions of Georgia there are more female students rather than males.

But lately women became more socially active, because of those changes and difficulties in our life. Traditional structure of Georgian family, where man used to work and woman used to be a housewife, had changed also.

There is also an opinion that the problem is not that men do not let women to the parliament. Women need to be more active, they need to be able to find their place in life. Some deep and serious changes in both female and male mentality need to take place.

Take into consideration these circumstances and you will not be surprised by the fact that currently gender inequality problems are becoming very urgent. International practice and history proves that the struggle for gender equality starts in difficult and crucial social conditions. Today our women start to defend their rights with the support of several serious international organizations. One of these organizations is OCSE - ?????, or - to be more precise -  one of its departments - Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

The office had been working very actively in the sphere of gender questions of Georgia since last summer. In June 2000 the first seminar for women NGO leaders was held in Tbilisi. The ODIHR gender questions specialist Tiina Ilsen prepared it.  Another step was made in August, when Georgian women-leaders of NGOs with the support of the Office experts united into the Coalition of Non-governmental organizations. This Coalition includes number of NGOs working at gender problems.

At this moment ODIHR together with the Coalition is been realizing a project called Women’s Leadership and NGO Coalition Building. The project provides special work with the leader women from different regions of Georgia. This work is supposed to make women from the regions become more active and initiative, take part in the decision making process.

After corresponding competition 22 women from 11 Georgian regions were chosen to take part in the project. These leaders met at the seminar held for them by gender questions experts from Poland. The seminar concerned, of course, gender questions and human rights. The women were also taught how to held special trainings for other women from the regions. Presently all the leaders believe that the project will help their friends to become more active in the social life and community service.

At the beginning of July these 22 women met in Tbilisi again to share their experience the experts and with each other. Each one of them had become a special kind of trainer and supervisor for other women in the region. Each one tried to teach women something more about their life, their rights, and their great potential. At that meeting women had stressed that they are ready to work more and harder, they are ready to do their best. They were glad to start working at these questions. They said they used to have a lack of communication with each other, problems increase, they say, when you can’t discuss them. “When I started first seminar in Gurjaani I suddenly felt how interested our women were. For that first seminar we gathered old retired women, this category suffers more problems than the others. Trust me, these women want to work, they have a lot of energy and they miss some real and serious business that they can do for their society,” said Jilda Kharitonishvili, the leader from Gurjaani (Kakheti Region). What is interesting, women say that their husbands understand that this job is very important and they respect it. 

The experts emphasized that leader women had changed a lot after they started the implementation of he project, they are just eager to do more for women development. This is the opinion of the ODIHR project coordinator Tiina Ilsen: “You can feel a great potential in these women, they are very active and sure can be very useful for their country.”