Women in Politics and "Sofa-Gate" Analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, University of Koblenz-Landau, course: Conflicts in Intercultural Communication, language: English, abstract: Women's political participation has risen sharply in the last three decades: women use their right to vote more often than men, they are represented in almost all political representative bodies, and they perceive politics as a career occupation. However, despite increased representation and female leaders in politics, there are still significant hurdles in implementing comprehensive equal opportunities: Women still get excluded from important critical decision-making processes, and they are also exposed to gender-specific cliches, which the mass media also reflects in political reporting. And not only in their own country but also at intercultural, political meetings. When not only different high-ranking politicians meet, but also different genders and cultures, there is often cause for great misunderstandings and indirect attacks on both country, person, and on gender, and even violations of fundamental and human rights. Due to the substantial increase in digitisation in recent years and constant video monitoring, it is now possible to record any politic- al meeting and analyse it afterward. These videos often help attract attention to grievances or ini- tiate meaningful, intercultural discussions, such as misogyny, discrimination, or heterogeneity.

In this term paper, I will analyse the political meeting of the President of the European Commis- sion Ursula von der Leyen, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the French Presid- ent of the European Council Charles Michele, with the question of whether Ursula von der Leyen had not got a chair because she is a woman. I will use two videos of the incident as research ma- terial, but I will focus on the gender aspect and leave out aspects such as body language and his- torical background, as these topics would be too comprehensive for this term paper. First, I will compare the roles of women in politics in Turkey and Germany, where I will go into a little more detail on the role of women in Turkey and the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, then I will analyse the videos with the background of this prior knowledge and finalize the term paper with a conclusion.