Women more on rolls, not in House

Despite the marginally larger female voters, women’s issues remain inadequately addressed by political parties. 

Despite the trend of a higher number of female voters, the political representation, in terms of the number of female candidates, or representation of gender-related issues, remains abysmally low. In the 2016 Assembly elections, there were only 83 female candidates (10%) among the 823 candidates announced before the polls, as reported earlier by DTNext. In addition, 31 female candidates (37.34%) were fielded in reserved constituencies.

Safety of women and empowerment issues were not on the voter’s priority list, as per the TN Governance Survey 2016 conducted by Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR). According to the Survey, in the urban areas, 23.59% of voters prioritised on the need for better employment opportunities, followed by control of noise pollution (21.82%), access to safe drinking water (20.69%), better primary health care infrastructure (18.89%), better roads (17.58%) and easing traffic congestions (17.34%). 

Empowerment of women and security (11.32%) ranked much lower on the list of voter’s priorities. 

The Gender Equality Election Checklist released by Prajnya Trust in 2016 pointed out that no political party approached parity in nomination, no strong evidence of concern about gender issues in the manifestoes or in the speeches. Political Scientist Dr Swarna Rajagopalan, Founder and Managing Trustee of the trust, said, “One side is that people are not reading the data. On the other, women need to demand their rights. We have not made women empowerment and safety a more important issue among the electorate. The higher female vote bank is a reason to highlight them now.”

According to the electoral roll data of January 5, 2017, there were totally 3987359 voters in the city’s 16 constituencies. This number included 1972641 male voters, 2013768 female voters and 950 voters belonging to the third gender. In the subsequent additions to the list, 16,081 males, 16,473 females and 19 persons from the third gender were added to the electoral rolls. 

As per the draft electoral rolls released on Tuesday, Chennai had a total number of 4073703 voters, with 2013167 male voters, 2059558 female voters and 978 third gender voters. 

Velachery had the highest number of voters (307616), while Harbour had the lowest (189102).