Need for Quotas for Women Candidates

[Gretchen Kelbaugh]

[this is from my new blog, but I gave myself permission to copy]

I keep hearing politically active people, women included, say "No" to the suggestion of quotas for women candidates in elections. Why are they considered so terrible?


Quotas are one of the key ways that most of the world's leading democracies -- and many smaller ones -- have so many more elected women than we have in Canada, the USA and the UK (Canada is ranked 48th in the world for percentage of elected women). From Sweden to Belgium, Germany and Spain and from Rwanda to South Africa and Peru, quotas for women candidates are used to great success.




Some say that women who get in because of quotas won't be respected. In 2005, the Labour Party in the UK had Women-Only Short Lists for candidates in some ridings. A few years later, no one remembered which MP's were from those quota ridings and which weren't -- there was no discrimination.




We Canadians use quotas all the time: geographical quotes. This ensures no one region dominates in government. But men still dominate politics for many reasons, so we need gender quotas until the barriers to women are gone.




Some barriers?

1. party elites prefer to choose men candidates

2. the high cost of campaigning (women still earn only 70% as much as men)

3. politics is time-consuming and not family friendly, which puts off more women than men (as society still expects women to do the majority of housework, childcare and eldercare)

4. the aggressive nature of politics puts off more women than men

5. media sexism



For info on quotas for women:

Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)

[Rosemary House]

Thanks for the link. I have another source (which is how I came up with the name for the site in the first place) but this one is better!

[Gretchen Kelbaugh]

Hi Rosemary. I just checked and we're 47th today, but it changes as often as democracies have elections. For awhile there, we were 50th, I think. It's easy to find out how we rank:
http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm

[Rosemary House]

Thanks for this Gretchen and I agree. I have no trouble with quotas or affirmative action for women or minorities when they may be useful, or, for example in the case of culture, protecting ours from the American giant with yes, quotas.... look how brilliantly well it worked for the music industry in Canada. And by the way, we are still at number 48 in terms of representation? I was afraid maybe we had dropped and that the 48th Parallel should become the 49th or the 50th or the 51st.....