SHANGHAI: Shanghai women are now much more enthusiastic about participating in politics and the decision-making process than ever before.

Statistics from the Shanghai Women's Federation show that over the past five years, some 82.7 per cent of women participated in elections of local people's congress deputy positions, while 79.1 per cent of the men voted in the same elections.

Most of the women voters said they made their decision after they made careful studies of the qualifications of the candidates.

Among the municipal People's Congress deputies elected earlier this year, 24.53 per cent were women, which is just over 1 percentage point higher than last term.

Meanwhile, by the end of 2001, the percentage of women working in the city's public administrative domain hit 40.5 per cent.

However, the overall percentage of women participating in the handling of State and social affairs or economic activities is still low.

A city-wide survey conducted in 2001 found that only about 21.7 per cent of urban women and 6 per cent of women in the countryside had ever held any managerial positions.

In the urban area, 88.4 per cent of working units have men in chief executive positions and in the countryside, 92.9 per cent of village heads are men.

Yet Shanghai Women's Federation claims the situation in Shanghai is still better than the national average.

In the rural areas around Shanghai, only 13.6 per cent of the village committees do not have women members, while the average national level is 25.9 per cent.

Local Shanghai people have also expressed their dissatisfaction over the low rate of female representation in local government.

Over 70 per cent of people surveyed said they believed that the proportion of women in government positions was too low.

Talking about the reasons behind these perceptions, most held that "the society has a prejudice against women" and "women have been provided with less training opportunities."

"So we women should work hard to improve ourselves if we want to keep taking higher social positions," said Meng Yankun, chairperson of the Shanghai Women's Federation, when analyzing the survey results.

The education level of women in Shanghai has increased over the past five years. Currently, 15.4 per cent of urban women have received a college education at least, which is 9 percentage points higher than 10 years ago.

And about 1.5 per cent of rural women have a college education or higher while a decade ago it was nonexistent.

(China Daily 08/25/2003 page9)