Changing the masculine face of politics

Looming federal and provincial elections spur support for potential women candidates.

by Jody Dallaire

As the province and the nation count down to elections in a year or two, women’s organizations are encouraging and helping women prepare to seek public office. One such project that I've participated in is Setting the Stage for Girls and Young Women to Succeed, an initiative of the well-respected organization Support to Single Parents.  

Setting the Stage aims to help young women think about non-traditional jobs and decision-making roles, such as politics — and to help them surmount barriers women still face to reaching positions of power.  I was honoured to be invited to discuss my own journey into municipal politics at a meeting with young women and girls living in the Greater Moncton area.

The Association francophone des ainés du Nouveau-Brunswick (New Brunswick francophone senior’s association) is organizing a similar initiative called Éveil à la citoyenneté des femmes et comment l’exercer (loosely translated as: Awakening women as engaged citizens and how to exercise power).

Both initiatives have the potential to increase women's participation in politics and in other decision-making positions, where historically, and still today, too few women are found. As even recalcitrant males now acknowledge, women have a  different and important perspective to bring to the table. We all lose when half of the population is not present at decision-making tables.

A Board or Council or Cabinet table needs more than one or two women present, though, for their voices to be effective. Rather, political scientists talk in terms of “critical mass” —  defined by the United Nations as 30 percent. That is, the composition of a decision-making body should comprise at least 30 percent women, and 30 percent men.

Since 2001, Equal Voice has promoted women’s multipartisan participation in politics at every level of government across Canada, through workshops, research, and online programs.  Equal Voice’s research shows some of the barriers that women face, including:

• public stereotypes of women’s family roles and other abilities;
• getting access to financial resources for the campaign;
• family commitments;
• media imbalance in treatment of female politicians;
• sexist perceptions of women’s behavior and conduct;
• the heavily masculine political environment; and
• women’s exclusion from informal political and party networks.

These barriers make reaching a critical mass of women in political institutions all the more important, to ensure that women’s concerns are translated into public policy initiatives.  Canada still falls short of the 30-30 gender balance needed to change our approach to politics and public policy.

Overall, across all provincial governments,  25.9 percent of our elected representatives are women. However, specific provinces’ participation rates range from 12.7 percent in New Brunswick to 32.8 percent in Quebec. Overall again, a quarter (25.8 percent) of people at Cabinet tables in provincial governments are women, but specific provinces range from 15.7 percent in Alberta to 42.1 percent in British Columbia. In New Brunswick, 22.2 percent of cabinet ministers are female.

Federally, 24.6 percent of our elected Members of Parliament are women. This average is not equally distributed among the political parties though. Nearly four in ten (38 percent) of NDP MPs are women, while the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois have 20 percent each. The Conservative Party trails behind with 17 percent female representation among its elected MPs.

I chuckled at some of the findings of a recently released American study called Girls Just Wanna Not Run: The Gender Gap in Young Americans’ Political Ambition, which claimed to identify five main reasons that fewer women than men seek elected office, which are:

• Young men are more socialized to think about a career in politics;
• Young women are less exposed to political information and discussions;
• Young men are more likely to have played organized sports and care about winning;
• Young women receive less encouragement from others to run for political office;
• Young women are less likely to think they will be qualified to run for office, even once they are established in their careers.

Most of these factors make sense — except the comment about organized sports seems 20 or 30 years out of date, at least in Canada. A September 2008 Statistics Canada study called Organized Extracurricular Activities of Canadian Children and Youth found similar participation rates for both boys and girls. For whatever reasons, girls do seem to have access to organized sports activities at nearly the same rate as boys (75 to 85 percent) from age 6 to 17.  Although many K-12 schools have cut back or eliminated formal physical education programs since then, the difference in access to team sports seems a weak argument to explain women’s lower participation rate.  

While training women to play the game of politics is valuable, I’d like to suggest that analyzing how to change the current rules may be a more productive approach to encouraging more capable men and women to put their names forward.  Are party riding associations still the gatekeepers that tend to prefer candidates like themselves — that is, men?

New Brunswick is scheduled for a provincial election September 22, 2014,  and there’s a federal election scheduled for October 19, 2015.  Equal Voice offers an online course for women who are considering running for office, called Getting to the Gate.  The federal Liberal party women’s caucus administers the Judy LaMarsh Fund for supporting Liberal women candidates.  The New Democrat Party women’s caucus administers the Olga Blondheim Fund for provincial women candidates and the Agnes McPhail Fund for federal women candidates.

The Conservative Party of Canada’s website  features a policy on Families but not on women’s issues. Nor does searching the CPC site for “women” turn up any information; in fact, the site shrugged off the search with barely a ripple.  Which is interesting, because the former Progressive Conservative Party had a strong and vibrant women’s caucus, before the merger with the Reform party.

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “There oughta be a law…” this would be a good time to start thinking about whether you’d make a good municipal, provincial, or federal candidate, and start scanning the landscape for resources.  You could watch local media for notice of public political training events, like the Setting the Stage workshop I participated in.  Or you could register for the Equal Voice online training program — it’s free! Remember: our democracy needs more women’s voices.

© Copyright 2013 Jody Dallaire, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca