You’ve come a short way, baby

Municipal and federal elections could reverse the steady decline in women’s representation

by Andrea Reimer

Last week I had the rarest moment for a woman in politics: to sit in a room entirely full of women, half of whom were under 21 to boot. Unlike many of the meetings I attend as an elected official, not one of these women were there to serve coffee, take minutes or provide briefing notes to men discussing Important Matters of Public Policy. Instead it was us women talking about public service and public policy, primarily grappling with the question of why so many meetings to discuss such important matters include so few of us.

Generally I’ve found that talking about the chronic under-representation of women is something that polite company is not altogether comfortable discussing. I’m a late-comer to the cause myself. My mother was a feminist and what child wants to be labeled with the same isms as their parents? And, precisely because she was a feminist, I had been brought up to believe that I could be the best at anything I set my mind to. Not the best woman, but the best person. But as I’ve wandered the world, it’s hard to miss the startling lack of women—particularly young women—in our decision-making structures.

In 2003, the most recent year for which global stats are available, women accounted for just 15.2 % of elected officials in state and national parliaments. There’s two ways to look at this. The first is the glass half full approach that genuinely congratulates women around the world for reaching this all-time world record for women’s representation. The second is to say it’s better but not good enough: women make up 51% of the global population and 36% too many men are making decisions on our behalf.

I’m not a glass half empty kind of gal, but in the case of women’s representation I tend toward the latter point of view, especially since here in BC we’re going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world.

In the most recent provincial election, women’s representation dropped to just 22% of elected MLAs. This is down from 24% in the last election and BC’s own high water mark of 28% in the election before that. The victorious BC Liberals did the best job of electing women in 2005 but even if all 10 of their female MLAs are appointed as cabinet ministers, they will still make up less than half of the legislature’s main decision-making body. Incidentally, only one of BC’s 79 elected officials is (barely) under 35 years old, even though one in four of the voting age population is between the ages of 18 and 35. And he’s not a woman.

The question of why women are doing so poorly has resulted in more studies than answers. The prevailing theory is that political parties are to blame because they don’t nominate enough women. There is some evidence to back this up: since the 1980s, female candidates have tended to win their seat in the same proportion as male candidates. However, this trend was reversed in the last election where nominated women candidates lost a disproportionately higher number of seats then did male candidates.

Which brings us to the second school of research which has produced compelling evidence that systemic barriers such as candidate-focused voting systems (“first past the post” and STV), combined with lax campaign finance laws, are the culprits. The argument here is that women lack the crucial support networks to attract enough money to do the advertising that candidate-focused elections require.

In either case—and the truth probably includes a little of both—changing our direction requires us as society to first collectively answer the bigger question of whether or not it would really matter to us if more women were elected.

Statistically, that’s a hard question to answer because only 14 countries have ever reached the 30% threshold determined by the United Nations as a critical mass for women to have a significant impact on the work of parliaments. What we do know is that those countries uniformly have a better record than us on almost every quality of life indicator, including gender equity. Sweden, which has had the most number of women elected the longest, has been so successful at implementing family and child-friendly policies that they no longer have a women’s movement. Or more accurately, they have a women’s movement and it’s called parliament

But beyond the statistics is an answer best found by the question I asked the gathering of women I was with last week. Imagine a table with eight women of all ages and cultural backgrounds talking about the future direction of social programs, the economy and the environment. Now take away seven of those women and replace them all with white men between the ages of 45 and 60. Man or woman yourself, do you feel you’re well-served by that discussion? Because that’s pretty much the composition of the provincial legislature, national parliament and city councils across the province debating important public policy matters on your behalf every day.

This is in part what compelled me to run for public office myself. After some frustration that governments weren’t effectively dealing with the issues that most affected my life, I realized that this probably wasn’t surprising because no elected officials actually looked like me.

Changing the culture takes more than one person though. This was vividly underlined for me shortly after I was elected to the Vancouver School Board in 2002. I was at a public consultation and, as is often the case at these sorts of things, someone needed to take notes and report back to the larger group. The seven men at that table all turned to me: as the youngest and most female person at the table they probably thought I was a natural with a magic marker.

Voters have culpability in the choices they are making at the ballot box, or at the very least by choosing not to get involved in political parties. We all know women who would provide excellent representation and make amazing contributions to public policy, something that has never been more direly needed. It’s our job to recruit these women and support them in getting elected in the upcoming civic and federal elections to help stem the steady decline of women's representation.

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