Yesterday RTE carried a story in which Fine Gael MEP Mairead McGuinness called for the establishment of gender quotas in the Dail to tackle the issue of gender equality. She said that Ireland has one of the lowest percentages of female political representatives and that unless decisive action is taken, it could take as much as 20 years to redress the balance. There are however, two key problems with her argument, firstly her numbers don't add up and secondly she falls into the trap of faulty cause and effect.
First off, let's look at the actual numbers. One of the "facts" quoted by Ms. McGuinness is that a woman's chances of being elected are about 72% that of a man. In the 30th Dail elections in 2007 there were 471 candidates in total. The gender split of these candidates is 391 men and 80 women. This represents 83% and 17% of the total respectively. When we then analyse the candidates and extract those who are current or former members of the house, we that the number of male candidates who have held political office is 164 which is 41.94% of all men or 34.82% of all candidates. The number of females who have held political office is 33 which is 41.25% of all women or 7% of all candidates. Therefore, when we look at the electoral success rates of men and women, we see that it depends on how you look at it.
The overall chance of a man being elected is five times that of a woman. When you examine the weighted percentages though, this bias disappears and you see a strikingly similar success rate: 41.94% vs. 41.25%. The reasonable conclusion to draw from this information then is that it is not electoral success that is the issue for female candidates but rather the number of female candidates who choose to put themselves forward. There is an important caveat here, however. The internal machinations of political parties when it comes to selecting candidates for election is not an easily accessible matter of public record and so it is unknown how many men or women put their name down at local level but are unsuccessful in obtaining their party's nomination. In this event, however, it is unwise to make conclusions about gender bias either way.
The issue of gender equality like most things life is complicated. There is more often than not, in gender bias debates, an assumption that the root cause of gender bias in a particular industry is because of current or historical oppression of women. Take truck driving for example. In 1995 there were 130,000 female truck drivers in America. Ten years later there were 155,000. There may now be as many as 200,000 female truckers in America. Yet female drivers represent just 15% of the total workforce. Some would argue that this is because women are only now being allowed to be truck drivers and societal norms would have forbidden such activity previously. It can also be argued however, that women before were simply not interested in becoming truck drivers. With changing economic conditions and an industry which suffers huge shortages in qualified drivers, more women would be tempted into careers as truck drivers.
The fact of the matter is that men and women have always had different roles in society. Difference does not equal inequality, however. When we examine the earliest human civilisations and modern primitive cultures, we see vastly different roles for men and women. In hunter-gatherer societies men would leave the village in a group for days on end, stalking some large predator. The women on the other hand, would care for all the children communally while gathering fire wood, berries, nuts and other food items as a group. This led to the development of different character traits in men and women. Women are more sociable, are better judges of character and do better on verbal reasoning and memory tests. Men on the other hand are more solitary and more competitive than women and do better on spatial reasoning and mathematical reasoning tests. These traits are deeply embedded in modern humans, and it is unwise to reason that we will be capable of adjusting over 100,000 years of hunter-gatherer lifestyle in just twenty or fifty or a hundred years. That's not to say that we shouldn't try to change things, just that we should be more realistic in how long it's going to change things.
This is where Mairead McGuinness has made a fundamental flaw in her logic. It's not the parliamentary system, that's broken, clearly female candidates are just as attractive to the voting public as male candidates. Rather, it's society that needs changing and we need to find ways to engage women on taking personal responsibility for bringing about such change. A quota system is not the answer and will lead to an even more broken Dail than the one we saw disintegrate before our eyes this week.
We should cut Ms. McGuinness some slack though. It's easy to see how the lone female candidate losing her seat in a constituency with eleven male candidates could perceive that there is a gender bias in the country at large. Unfortunately, for most of our politicians, reality is a strange and disturbing place.
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