The World - News from Aug. 25, 1989

Women are finding it harder to get into parliament, the Inter-Parliamentary Union said. The percentage of women in the world’s legislatures fell to 12.7% in mid-1989, down from 14.6% at the start of 1988. In 1975, the first year of the U.N. Decade for Women, the figure was 12.5%. “The stagnation is very striking,” Michel Barton, spokesman for the IPU, told a Geneva news conference. The IPU said that in mid-1989, in the 130 parliaments responding to a survey, 3,937 out of 31,055 legislators were women compared with about 4,167 out of 28,544 in 133 parliaments at the start of 1988. The biggest drop was in the Soviet Union--from 34.5% to 15.3%.