Check against delivery While gender equality and women’s rights are already issues not easy to raise for women belonging to majority groups, one can imagine the difficulties that confront minority women when claiming their rights. Indeed, minority women have to face and overcome discrimination from the majority community, both as women and minority, but also from within their own communities. Specific obstacles that hinder women’s political participation are well known: they are the ideological factors that emanate from the patriarchal system dominating still most countries in the world and that have placed men in the public sphere and women in the private arena of home, as mothers and wives. Although the gender role ideology is not static and the boundaries between public and private arena have become blurred, women continue to be excluded from politics based on ideological prejudices and customary law. Another factor of exclusion is the nature and the structure of politics itself, considered a male-dominated sphere alien to women’s concerns. Socio-cultural factors are detrimental to women��s political participation in general, and for minority women in particular as gender disparities are likely to be increased for minority women in all fields of women’s life, including politics. Also women have limited time to participate in politics because of their stereotyped role as mothers and wives. Economic factors are further obstacles, women lacking access to and ownership of resources. An additional and severe constraint for women belonging to minorities is that they are often not the head of their communities and are absent from their constituency base. Additionally women, and especially minority women, continue to be portrayed in a negative, inferior and stereotypical manner in the media and society. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has addressed participation of women in political and public life in its General Recommendation No. 23 adopted in 1997. According to the Committee, public and private spheres of human activity have always been wrongly considered distinct and apart, and have been regulated accordingly. Consistently, women have been assigned to the private or domestic sphere, associated with reproduction and the raising of children, and in all societies these activities have been treated as inferior to public and political life. An examination of the reports of States parties to CEDAW shows that while almost all States have adopted constitutional or other legal provisions that grant to both women and men the equal right to vote in all elections and public referenda, in many nations women continue to experience difficulties in exercising this right. Concluding observations of the Committee demonstrate that women are excluded from top-ranking positions in cabinets, the civil service and in public administration, in the judiciary and in justice systems. Such examination also demonstrates that women are underrepresented in political parties or concentrated in less influential roles than men. On the international area, women are seriously underrepresented in the diplomatic and foreign services of most Governments, and particularly at the highest ranks. In terms of strategies for empowering minority women’s political participation and combatting blatant discrimination in this field, the use of temporary special measures is provided for and recommended by international human rights law, supported by empirical research produced by the scholars with international experiences. For example, the CEDAW Committee regularly 3