Mistaking male bias for impartial, universal, common sense means that when people (men) come across someone trying to level the playing field, it’s often all they can see (perhaps because they read it as bias). A 2017 paper found that while white male leaders are praised for promoting diversity, female and ethnic minority leaders are penalised for it.20 This is partly because by promoting diversity, women and ethnic minorities remind white men that these female ethnic-minority leaders are, in fact, women and ethnic minorities. And so all the stereotypes that go along with that become salient: bossy, assertive, cold and all the rest. Conversely, ethnic minority and female leaders ‘avoid negative stereotypes when they engage in low levels of diversity-valuing behavior’. At last, empirical proof for what most women (even if they don’t admit it to themselves) have always known, at least implicitly: playing along with patriarchy is of short-term, individual benefit to a woman. There’s just the minor issue of being on borrowed time.
The finding that engaging in ‘diversity-valuing behavior’ reminds people that a woman is in fact a woman perhaps explains how Sanders came to think that all Clinton said was ‘vote for me, I’m a woman’ – because the data shows that she certainly didn’t. A word-frequency analysis of her speeches by Vox journalist David Roberts revealed that Clinton ‘mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 times, racism, women’s rights and abortion a few dozen times each.’ But, pointed out US writer Rebecca Solnit in her London Review of Books piece on the election, ‘she was assumed to be talking about her gender all the time, though it was everyone else who couldn’t shut up about it’.21
What all of this means on a grander scale is that democracy is not a level playing field: it is biased against electing women. This is a problem, because male and female legislators inevitably bring different perspectives to politics. Women lead different lives to men because of both their sex and their gender. They are treated differently. They experience the world differently, and this leads to different needs and different priorities. Like a male-dominated product-development team, a male-dominated legislature will therefore suffer from a gender data gap that will lead it to serve its female citizens inadequately. And most of the world’s governments are male-dominated.
As of December 2017, women made up an average of 23.5% of the world’s parliamentarians, although this figure hides significant regional variation: Nordic parliaments are on average 41.4% female while Arab parliaments are on average 18.3% female.22 Women account for 10% or less of parliamentarians in thirty-one countries, including four countries that have no female parliamentarians at all. And in most countries precious little is being done to remedy this.
In 2017 the UK’s Women and Equalities Committee produced a report with six recommendations for the government to increase female representation in Parliament.23 They were all rejected.24 One of the recommendations was for the government to allow all-women shortlists (AWS) in local as well as general elections, and to extend their legality beyond the current 2030 cut-off point. In the British system, each political party holds an internal election for every constituency to decide which candidate will stand for them in a general election. AWS are used in these internal elections if a party wants to ensure that their general-election candidate will be a woman.
AWS were first used in the UK’s 1997 elections. In January 1997, the United Kingdom tied with St Vincent & the Grenadines and Angola in the world rankings of female parliamentarians.25 With a 9.5% female House of Commons, they all sat in joint fiftieth place. But by December of the same year the UK had suddenly shot up to twentieth place, because in May it had an election. And in that election the Labour Party, the UK’s main opposition party, made use of AWS for the first time. The effect was dramatic. The number of female Labour MPs leapt from thirty-seven to 101 (the overall rise in female MPs was from sixty to 120).
In the 2017 UK general election, Labour used AWS for 50% of its winnable seats, and 41% of the candidates the party fielded were female. The Tories and the Lib Dems, neither of whom used AWS, fielded 29% each. The UK’s House of Commons is currently (2018) 32% female, which places it at thirty-ninth in the world rankings – a drop in standing which is partly a result of other countries catching up, and partly a result of the dominance of the Conservative Party which still doesn’t use AWS (43% of Labour’s MPs are female compared to 21% of the Conservatives).
It is clear that Labour’s use of AWS has driven a significant proportion of the increase in female MPs. The government’s refusal to extend their legality beyond 2030 is therefore tantamount to legislating for a resumption of male bias in British democracy. Perhaps they haven’t read the data on the impact female politicians bring to legislation. Or, perhaps they have.
The British government’s refusal to extend AWS to local elections is if anything more perplexing, because female representation is even worse in local government. Britain’s trend towards devolution was meant to be about giving power back to local communities (local government, on which Britain spends £94 billion each year, plays a vital role in providing services that women in particular depend on). But the evidence uncovered by a 2017 report commissioned by women’s charity the Fawcett Society suggests that it is mainly giving power back to men.26
The Fawcett Society report found that nine councils across England and Wales still have all-male cabinets, while only 33% of council chief executives are female. Just one in three councillors in England is a woman, up only five percentage points in two decades. All six of the newly elected metro mayors are men (in the latest Liverpool election none of the main parties even fielded a female candidate), and just 12% of cabinet members in devolved areas are women.
The Fawcett report is all the evidence we have, because the data is not being collected by government, so unless this particular charity continues to collect the data, it will be impossible to monitor progress. And yet the government’s reasoning for refusing to extend AWS to local or mayoral elections is that the ‘evidence base is as yet underdeveloped’.27 Given they also refused the committee’s most basic recommendation to force parties to collect and publish candidate-diversity data (on the basis of the ‘regulatory burden which this would impose’), this stance leaves those who would like to see a less male-biased form of democracy take hold in Britain at something of a disadvantage.
Three of the recommendations in the Women and Equalities report concerned the implementation of quotas, and it was not surprising that these were rejected: British governments have traditionally been opposed to such measures, seeing them as anti-democratic. But evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women.28 In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they ‘increase the competence of the political class in general’. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.
The form of quota that is available to a country depends on the electoral system it operates. In the UK, each of the country’s 650 constituencies has a single MP. This MP is voted in using ‘first past the post’ (FPTP), which means that the candidate with the most votes gets returned to Parliament. Since there is only one candidate per constituency, in a FPTP system all-women shortlists are really the only practicable corrective to male bias.
In Sweden, a party list is used. In this system, each constituency is represented by a group of MPs allocated under proportional representation (PR). Every party draws up a list of candidates per constituency, with candidates set down in order of preference. The more votes a party receives, the more candidates from its list are elected to represent that constituency. The lower a candidate is listed, the less likely she is to win a seat.
In 1971, only 14% of Swedish parliamentarians were female.29 The Social Democratic Party (SDP) decided to try to add
ress this discrepancy, first with a recommendation in 1972 that party districts should place ‘more women’ on electoral lists.30 By 1978, this had evolved into a recommendation that lists reflect the proportion of female party members, and in 1987 a 40% minimum target was introduced. None of these measures had a significant effect on the number of female MPs elected: you could have a 50% female list, but if all the women were down at the bottom, they weren’t likely to win a seat.
So in 1993 the SDP introduced what is known as a ‘zipper’ quota. Two lists must be produced: one of male candidates and one of female candidates. These two lists are then ‘zipped’ together, so you end up with a list that alternates male and female candidates. In the 1994 election that followed, female representation leapt eight points,31 and has never dipped below 40% since32 (although the proportion of women in parliament has been slipping as Sweden has increasingly been voting for more right-wing parties that don’t operate gender quotas).
Compare this to South Korea, which provides an instructive example of how something as seemingly unrelated to gender as an electoral system can in fact make all the difference to female representation. South Korea operates a mixed electoral system with around 18% of its seats allocated under PR,33 and the rest working in the same way as the UK Parliament: single-member districts (SMD) elected under a FPTP. Both systems operate under a quota for female representation.
When the PR system quotas were increased from 30% to 50% for the 2004 elections, female representation more than doubled in the South Korean parliament. This sounds impressive, but they were starting from a low base, because while the parties more or less stick to the quota in the PR system, it’s a different story in the SMD. Here, 30% of candidates are supposed to be women, but in a recent election women comprised only 7% of the Saenuri Party’s and 10% of the Democratic United Party’s SMD candidates. If both SMD and PR quotas were adhered to, the South Korean parliament would be around 33.6% female. As it is, female representation currently stands at 15.7%.
It’s not hard to see why there’s such a stark difference in quota compliance between the two systems: FPTP and SMD electoral systems are a zero-sum game.34 Winner takes all. And so while on a macro level all-women shortlists in such systems are a fair corrective to an unfair system, on a micro level they certainly feel less fair – particularly to the specific man who wasn’t even allowed to compete.
This was the argument of two rejected Labour candidates, Peter Jepson and Roger Dyas-Elliott. In 1996, the two men brought a legal challenge against the Labour Party in the UK, arguing that AWS fell foul of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Given what we know about the invisible positive discrimination that operates in favour of men this was perhaps not in the spirit of the Act. It was, however, in the letter of it, and Jepson and Dyas-Elliott won their case. AWS were briefly outlawed before being brought back in via the Labour government’s 2002 Act. Originally intended to run until 2015, in 2008 Harriet Harman, then Labour’s deputy leader, announced that its run would be extended to 2030.35 Meanwhile, Dyas-Elliot was most recently to be found in court receiving a restraining order for sending a rival MP’s wife a dead bird.36
Worldwide, the countries with the highest levels of female political representation tend to use PR.37 With this in mind, and given South Korea’s and Sweden’s experiences, perhaps the UK’s Women and Equalities Committee shouldn’t have called for quotas as a first step. If they really want to see female representation increase in Parliament, perhaps their first demand should be full electoral reform. But increasing female representation is only half the battle, because it’s not much use getting women elected if they’re prevented from doing their job effectively once they’re there. And frequently, they are.
Clare Castillejo, a specialist in fragile states, writes that women’s influence in government is often limited by their exclusion from male-dominated patronage networks.38 Women may be present at formal talks, but this isn’t much good if the men are forming backroom quid pro quo networks (something Castillejo cautions is particularly common in post-conflict settings39) and going off to have the real discussion in ‘informal spaces that women cannot access’.40
The practice of excluding women from decision-making is widespread, and it is one of the most efficient ways (second only to not electing women at all) that this male-biased system has of siphoning off gendered data in the form of female life experience and perspective. In a 2011 survey of US legislators, 40% of women disagreed with the statement ‘The leaders in my legislature are as likely to consult with the women in the legislature as the men when making important decisions’ (interestingly, only 17% of men disagreed with it).41 Similarly, a 2017 report on local government in the UK referenced ‘informal networks within local government where real power lies’ and in which women are ‘less likely to be involved’.42
But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men.43 During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times.44And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment45) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’,46 although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.47
Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50
Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia.
The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).
Political abuse is a distinctly gendered phenomenon.51 During the 2016 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton received almost twice as many abusive tweets as Bernie Sanders. The most common word associated with her was ‘bitch’. Bitch was also the most common term used in tweets about Australian ex-PM Julia Gillard, who between 2010 and 2014 was similarly the target of almost twice as many abusive messages as her political rival Kevin Rudd. O
ne European MP told the IPU that she once received more than 500 rape threats on Twitter over a period of four days.52 Another woman had been sent information about her son – ‘his age, the school he attends, his class, etc. – threatening to kidnap him’.
Sometimes it’s not ‘just’ threats. More than one in five female parliamentarians surveyed by the IPU had been ‘subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence’, while a third had witnessed sexual violence being committed against a female colleague. During the 2010 elections in Afghanistan, nearly all of the female candidates received threatening phone calls,53 and some female MPs in the country require round-the-clock protection.54 ‘Almost every day I fear for my life,’ Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian in 2014;55 a year later one of her female colleagues died in a car bomb – the second deadly attack on a female politician in Afghanistan in the space of three months.56
The aggression seems to increase along with the proportion of female politicians. Research from around the world (including saintly Scandinavia) has shown that as female representation increases, so does hostility against female politicians.57 Especially from their male colleagues. Studies58 in the US and New Zealand have shown that men ‘become more verbally aggressive and controlling of both committee hearings and parliamentary debates following an expansion in the proportion of women in the legislature’. Another study found that as the proportion of women in US Congress increases (bear in mind Congress is only 19.4% female59), women are less likely to achieve leadership positions within their parties.60 Further research61 from the US and Argentina has shown that having large numbers of female legislators is ‘tied to both women’s diminished success in passing legislation and reduced chances of being appointed to “masculine” and “powerful” Committees’.62 In a similar vein, US analysis has found that framing human rights issues as women’s rights issues makes male politicians less likely to support legislation, and if a rights bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down and states are less likely to invest resources.63 It seems that democracy – in so far as it pertains to women – is broken.
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