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The Austrian parliament named a woman as its speaker for the first time in the country's history on Monday, following a narrow election win for the Social Democrats on October 1.
With one female and one male deputy speaker also elected, the office is now dominated by women.
Barbara Prammer, a Social Democrat feminist and already a deputy speaker under the previous administration, was elected with 135 votes out of a total of 183 during the opening session of the assembly on Monday.
Trained as a sociologist, the divorced mother of two began her political career at the local level in her province of Upper Austria, where she supported human rights, especially women's rights, and the environment.
Moving on to national politics in the 1990s, she became minister for women's affairs before being named deputy speaker of the Nationalrat, the lower chamber of the Austrian parliament, in 2004.
The parliament's speaker traditionally comes from the winning party, with two deputy speakers taken from the second and third most popular parties.
Michael Spindelegger of the conservative OVP and Eva Glawischnig of the Greens were each elected vice-president. Spindelegger narrowly beat Maria Kefter to his party's candidature.
The newly-constituted parliament maintains a majority of male deputies however, with only 31 percent of the assembly made up of women.
The environmental Green party is the only one to have more than half with 12 female deputies out of a total 21.
The share of women deputies is lowest among the two far-right parties, with 14 percent for the Alliance for Austria's Future (BZOe) and 9.5 percent for the Freedom Party (FPOe.)
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AFP 302148 GMT 10 06
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