Some links to women quotas

From About Quotas:
"This website reveals that the use of electoral quotas for women is much more widespread than is commonly held. An increasing number of countries are currently introducing various types of gender quotas for public elections: In fact, half of the countries of the world today use some type of electoral quota for their parliament.

Today women constitute 18.4 percent of the members of parliaments around the world. Recently, Rwanda superseded Sweden at the number one in the world in terms of women’s parliamentary representation — 56.3 percent women against Sweden’s 47.3 percent. Rwanda is an example of the new trend to use electoral gender quotas as a fast track to gender balance in politics. Other parliaments, however, still have very few women elected."

A Female Parliamentary Majority in Just One Country: Rwanda

The World’s Best Countries for Women gives links to various women empowerment indices.
From one such in 2007 India ranks 114 among 128 listed, below Qatar (at 109), recent destination of M.F.Husain.
P.S. Some information about proposed Indian quotas here(via Nanoploitan). A quote:
"Does such a quota exist anywhere else in the world?

Yes, in Argentina, Pakistan, Uganda, Bangladesh, Eritrea and Tanzania."

I am not sure what this means in view of the assertion in the first reference about hlf the countries having some sort of quota for women and the case of Rwanda. May be it means over 33 percent. Another interesting point, the big parties and the communist parties are for it whereas some of the parties representing weaker sections are against it.
More comprehensive links in OUTLOOK: Now, The Better Third