남녀동수(Gender Parity) 의회구성의 헌법적 정당성

Women’s under-representation in politics, particularly in the representative body like elected assembly has been widely debated for decades in modern representative democracies. From a perspective of descriptive representation, the composition of the parliament has come to the center of the debate. This problem has been commonly recognized, debated and developed in terms of gender inequality and thus the movement for enhancing women’s participation in the parliament has been led by feminist scholars and women’s rights activists. With help of them along with the development of the international human rights norms, gender quotas in the election have been widely introduced to the countries. Nevertheless, it is still far from achieving equal representation of women in any country. Furthermore, legal disputes and political resistance against gender quotas as affirmative action are not settled. In this paper, I suggest a transition of viewpoint on women’s under-representation in the parliament into the distortion of political representation and democratic deficit. On basis that, I advocate gender parity in the parliament, rather than a minimum number of women, as a requirement for achieving more democratic representation. I argue gender parity is not unconstitutional but rather corresponds to representative democracy. Practically, some countries already have adopted the parity principle at the legislative level or constitutional level for more than a decade. In this paper, I also explore the comparative cases of Greece, Belgium, France, and Germany to find the best way to institutionalize the gender parity principle in Korea and propose to adopt it in the Constitution.