Women have only ever filled 15% of seats in the Dáil or the Seanad in any one session of parliament.
Sally Hayden | Staff Writer
It would be funny to visit Earth as an androgynous alien. “Wow, you guys are weird looking”, you would exclaim as you walked/hopped/apparated/blobbed off your UFO. And then you would follow this up with some acute observations on the human condition. “Why do doughnuts have holes? Why are things typed up but written down? Why does just one of your genders wear extremely uncomfortable shoes?”
Forty years ago the Irish Commission on the Status of Women published its first report. A body set up to “make recommendations on the steps necessary to ensure the participation of women on equal terms and conditions with men in the political, social, cultural and economic life of the country”, it concluded that there were no constitutional or legal provisions in Ireland restricting the participation of women in politics, and indeed no other evidence of formal discrimination against them. The board floundered in an attempt to come up with other reasons why women weren’t represented, and hit on the expected. They suggested apathy. They suggested the distraction of family life. They suggested that things were getting better.
Two generations later and women have never filled more than 15% of the seats in either the Dail or the Seanad. Ireland is currently ranked 79th in the world for representation of women in our national parliament, with women holding a mere 25 of the 166 elected TD spots available.
And yet the arguments keep coming.
The meritocracy argument – “But we should judge our politicians on their merits, not on their body parts,” you cry. So let’s lay this one to rest. Since when were any of our politicians qualified? As far as I know, less than a third of our Ministers for Finance have actually been economists. And before you think I’m belittling them, what are the qualifications to be a politician anyway?
The credibility argument – “But gender quotas discredit the achievements of women that are already in power.” This reasoning is dangerous, because it simultaneously compliments a small group of women, while ensuring that their group stays small. It is also wrong, because it is built on the idea that the electorate is sexist enough to treat all women as the same. In fact, gender quotas encourage the electorate to regard female candidates as different by supplying more of them to choose between. They don’t force us to elect anyone, they just force us to be given more options. More options means that we don’t have to pick “the female candidate” whose views we disagree with but whose sex we like, we just have to pick “the candidate” who may or may not have lady-parts. Gender quotas force political parties to supply us with a (slightly more) gender-balanced choice. And who doesn’t love choice?
The slippery slope argument – “Where does it all end then? Shouldn’t travellers get a quota? Shouldn’t religious groups get a quota?” This argument accidentally but inherently points out how bad the situation is, because it directly equates women with minorities. In fact, the situation of women today is unique. We are underrepresented, but readily available. We are the only minority that is often a majority. As a questionable man once said, there are binders full of us. Many countries in the world now show a higher female voter turnout than male. We are not asking for an exact percentage of representation, because then we’d need 50%. But when the 50% is consistently reduced to 15%, then there must be a skew in the system.
So far this article hasn’t answered the major question of what that skew is. Identifying it is something that’s regularly brought up in this debate. Why don’t women just get elected? If they want to be represented, why don’t they represent?
To answer this we could suggest lots of things. We could look back to history. We could suggest that women don’t run because they’re not used to running. Women don’t get elected because we’re not used to voting for them. Female suffrage didn’t exist anywhere in 1890, and by 1994 only 96% of the world’s females had gained it. We could argue that politicians are people who are good at garnering support, and women have to wear a less trodden path while doing that. And if this answer isn’t satisfactory enough we could move onto the old reliables. We could suggest apathy. Family life. Things are getting better.
But the real question is whether we want more women as elected representatives. Whether we feel that smart women – the ones who may be quotaed onto ballot sheets, but will also fight to win our votes – could add something to our government, and to our government’s way of making laws. More than a hundred countries in the world now implement gender quotas at some level of government. Ireland’s not pioneering, it’s stagnating. We’re falling behind.
Our androgynous alien friend might not recognise gender, but that doesn’t mean his planet doesn’t have its own issues. The measure of the inclusiveness of a society is not whether it has problems, but how it deals with them. When people bring out the same recycled arguments against affirmative action we don’t remind ourselves that forty years ago we were having the same conversation we are now. And we don’t remind ourselves that forty years ago we failed to come up with a positive solution.
If quotas don’t work, we can always try something else. The opposite of equality isn’t inequality, it’s resignation, and it’s time to try for change.
