Absolutely. -- If they are elected. -- Women are equal to men, they can run for any office and get elected or not. It's up to women to run. Seats should not be reserved for women, African-Americans, Jews, Irish, or any other special group. They could hold more than 50% of the seats -- as long as they are elected. But I'd like to hear a well thought out other side of the argument. P.

Heck no, that would imply that women are the equals of men :-) Seriously, I don't like quotas, but if the percentage of women is statistically different from 50%, then maybe we should wonder about the diversity issue.

Definitely not. I don't have any particular problem with women in any job, including legilation, but I also don't agree with quotas, especially not for the results of democratic elections! Maybe we need to ask why we're so far away, in modern democracies, from seeing something resembling a 50 / 50 split, and getting to the answer requires us to be brutally honest about ourselves and our society. I believe social values instilled within women, such as "the dream" of marriage and a family, are horribly detrimental to the cause of women's equality. Marriage itself, originally a ritual of ownership and not love, is harmful for women, and very obsolete in the modern world. Modern feminism, or feminazism, also does a lot of harm, stressing women's differences from men; classical feminists, the ones that actually fought for women's rights, stressed the similarities and the fundamental sameness of the sexes. There might always be an inequity due to the fact that women have the children, and even though some women very successfully balance this with careers, it is difficult and this difficulty will always create some inequity. However, we can go a long way to raising it closer to 50 / 50 by reducing the highly damaging social programming into young girls that the be-all and end-all is to get married and be mothers, or that the feminazi idea that women are "emotional" and "nurturing" and "soft", and that these are good things. Not that those aren't okay things, but the so-called "male" qualities are those that get people more often than not into successful careers and into politics. If you really analyze the success of really successful women in business and politics, you see a pattern of so-called "maleness" in their values and behaviour. We need to cut out this language, and this false social distinction, between "male" and "female" qualities, since any of these can appear in either gender. How much we can accomplish may be limited ultimately by biology, but I think we're far away from reaching those limits, if they exist.

That would make sense, wouldn't it? Esp. when that group is supposed to represent the people they govern?

Well, because women can now vote, and we have the option to put women in congress; i just believe it should be how the majority of men and women vote.