Greece’s new Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has come under fire for the lack of female representation in parliament, the current cabinet of 22 having only two women.
Questioned about it in an interview with the BBC Hardtalk‘s Zeinab Badawi, Mitsotakis said that he does want to see more women in politics, but said this time around the current numbers were due to women themselves not being interested in the positions.
“Unfortunately we don’t have that many women who were interested in stepping into politics these days,” he said.
“If you look at what we did, we put a quota for women, 40 per cent of our candidates were women, which is a big step forward. But if you look at the composition of parliament, we don’t have 40 per cent of women in parliament.
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“I asked a lot of women to join the cabinet, they were much more hesitant than men to do so. So I’m not happy about our gender composition, I openly acknowledged it.
“The women that we have are extremely capable, I’m sure they’re going to do a fantastic job and I’m sure that they’re going to help other women to join the cabinet when we have our first reshuffle.”