drawing of a woman worker raising fist - equality when?

EQUALITY WHEN?: Seriously, how will we know?

Last updated: April 1st, 2019

The recent British House of Commons election made history when it resulted in almost 30 percent of seats being held by women. That’s literally the best the British House of Commons has ever done and has rightly been celebrated as a step towards greater participation for women in politics. More women should be in politics. Period.

It’s also been cited as an example of women moving closer to equality in politics, and that should give us some pause. What will define gender equality and how will we know if and when we achieve it? Are numbers actually objective indicators of parity?

Many second-wave feminists have made the argument that politics is a system whose rules and regulations were written by men, whose structure was made by and for men, and whose successes and failures have been measured by their benefit to men. Women have not had a say in how political systems are built and run. Inserting individual women into that complex system hasn’t impacted the system. If we insert a ton of women into the system, will that make it more amenable to and representative of women’s voices?

Possibly, but showing up to the ball game and making the plays you think need to be made are very different things. Suggesting that equal political participation can be ensured by numbers alone overlooks the fact that people are governed by a lot more than laws; we’re governed by unwritten codes, customs and expectations that inform all aspects of our ideas, our behaviour and our language. Study after study show us that even women at the top of their profession tend to fall into very conventional gender patterns; doubting their abilities, talking less in meetings, undervaluing their contributions and letting assertive men take the lead. If women account for 50 percent of members of a parliamentary committee but men make 100 percent of the decisions, that’s not equality.

I’m not saying that that does or doesn’t happen. But I will suggest that a vast number of cultures operate under gender ideologies that statistically make women less likely to stand up to male co-workers, less likely to speak and less likely to be taken seriously. These same ideologies make issues that primarily affect women less likely to be seen as real problems, let alone political problems, and evening out the numbers won’t fix that.

Also, the British elections are a clear example of how numbers can be used to erase people. If we call this a victory for women, we should also ask which women. Does that 30 percent proportionally represent disabled women? Women of colour? Queer women? Poor women? It does not.

This is a victory for some women. Calling it a win for women “generally” ignores the fact that there are lots of different kinds of women, some of whom are always less likely to have their voices heard.

Numbers are not enough. There has to be a concerted and deliberate effort to make the numbers mean something; a plan to ensure that nobody’s political presence is a token. There are countries in the world that show us what numbers and deliberate efforts together could do to create more equitable public participation. “In 2008, Rwanda became the first nation in history to have more women members in a national parliament than men,” the OECD’s Social Institutions & Gender Index reminds us. Like a number of African nations, Rwanda has adopted quotas for female electoral candidates (30 percent of candidates must be women), along with women’s councils and specifically women’s elections to ensure that the quota is met. Currently, 63.8 percent of seats are held by women.

Rwanda’s commitment to making sure women are represented in the public sphere is paralleled by a commitment to making women’s issues more visible. Women in Rwanda have recently been legally entitled to maternity leave, the judicial system now prioritizes cases of rape (largely in response to the prevalence of sexual violence during and beyond the 1994 genocide) and governments have initiated large-scale changes to property, marriage and inheritance laws to benefit women.

These are important issues to address not necessarily because women care more about them, but because maternal responsibility, poverty and the threat of violence have historically been barriers to women’s participation in public life. A coordinated national effort to alleviate those barriers suggests that the government is actually and concretely interested in including women. It’s in no way a perfect system. But it does give some sense of what cultural changes might be possible for women if addressing the systemic inequities that disadvantage them was made a priority.

It’s unclear if these changes are the result of women’s presence in politics reaching some kind of critical mass where those in power could positively affect other women’s lives, or if a more inclusive political system was the catalyst for greater female participation. The most interesting and hopeful implication seems to be that if all countries did more than make a law that said that anyone who wanted to could run for political office—if measures were taken to ensure that political offices were a viable option for people wanting to address a diverse range of potentially underrepresented ideas and issues—then actual diversity might occur at the highest levels of power. For me, that would look a lot more like parity.


image: woman raising fist via Shutterstock

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