Women don’t find centre stage on election posters
ISLAMABAD: In the run up to the local government elections in the federal capital, nearly every neighbourhood has been plastered with posters by all major candidates. But while nearly every panel has a woman councillor, not all of them are featured as prominently on these banners as their male counterparts.
A drive through the city reveals that while there are women candidates, especially those vying for the chairman/vice chairman slot, whose posters feature them prominently, most other panels have not put their women candidates at the forefront.
But there are exceptions: Amina Sadaf, the PTI candidate for woman councillor from UC-50; and Rashida Sohail, a PML-N aspirant for the general councillor seat in UC-29.
Major parties reluctant to put women candidates on campaign material
Sector E-11 is strewn with PTI posters with Ms Sadaf’s image front and centre, with smaller photographs of the other men on the ticket. But Ms Sohail’s banners, which can be found across Sector F-10, are separate from her colleagues.
But this is not the norm by any stretch of the imagination and one is hard pressed to find any other women candidates in the city who are prominently part of their party’s election campaigns. In fact, most other panels’ posters do not even feature a smaller photo of their women candidates.
“Just think about the number of seats allocated to women in the national and provincial assemblies; I don’t think it so odd that women are not better represented on campaign banners,” says veteran rights activist Tahira Abdullah.
Tahir Mehdi of the Punjab Log Sujag, an NGO striving for equal opportunities in the political sphere, told Dawn that parties seemed to think they had dealt with the ‘woman issue’ by including reserved members in parliament and fielding women councillors, which is why they did not make an effort to better represent women in politics. “Two reserved seats are thought to be enough to represent women.”