“It’s a conscious attempt to silence and regulate what women can say and what women can do as female politicians,” Fontaine said. Social media platforms needed to do a better job policing abuse. Canadians needed to do a better job standing up to this kind of bullying. Male politicians needed to be vocal allies. The host interrupted. Were male allies actually stepping up? Fontaine hesitated for a second.
“Perhaps not as much as I’d like,” she said.
THERE ARE ANY number of barriers to women’s participation in politics around the world, resting on countless cultural, social, and historical inequalities. But, if we’re looking for a pithy explanation, I like this one from Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women: “Men tend to choose those who are made in their own image.”
More than one hundred countries have gender quotas as part of their political systems, some voluntary, some constitutional. Even then, female politicians account for fewer than a quarter of parliamentary positions worldwide: The number in 2016 was 23.3 percent, up from 22.6 percent a year earlier, and 13.1 percent in 2000. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, which compiles the figures, estimates that at this rate it will take fifty years to reach gender parity.
Canada ranks 62 out of 190 countries. Rwanda, which has gender quotas, ranks first, with women making up nearly 62 percent of the lower house of parliament.
You might be surprised that Canada doesn’t rank higher, given that the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is often presented as a Feminist Dudley Do-Right in the international press. Indeed, there is something refreshing about a leader who happily calls himself a feminist. But there is talking the talk, and then there’s actually walking to the bank, withdrawing cash, and using it to solve the problem.
When Trudeau announced that he would have an equal number of women and men in his first cabinet, the world sighed. He was asked why it had been so important to him to appoint so many women, and he shrugged with his father’s insouciance and said: “Because it’s 2015.” You could almost see the little pink hearts dancing around his head.
Unfortunately, more than a year later, it’s evident that it’s not all rainbows and ice cream in Canada’s feminist utopia. For one thing, Trudeau abandoned his promise of electoral reform: Canada’s first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system is generally considered unfavourable to women and other candidates from non-traditional political backgrounds. (“First past the post” means that the person with the most votes in a particular contest wins the seat, even if it’s not a majority of votes; in competing systems, political representation is awarded according to the percentage of votes a party receives.) The Liberals promised the election of 2015 would be the last contested under the old rules.
After he’d been in power for a year, Trudeau’s government abandoned the promise. Worse, he put a rookie female MP, Maryam Monsef, in charge of electoral reform — it was the political equivalent of asking her to stand in the sun holding a dead fish. Its failure became hers. Don’t think other female politicians didn’t notice. As Oxfam Canada noted in its 2017 Scorecard, “The Liberal government’s bold feminist rhetoric has not yet translated into tangible policy and spending decisions that can really push the needle forward on gender equality.”
A winner-takes-all political system is only one reason that women are blocked from power. They are also denied access to networking and fundraising opportunities that are available to men. They suffer from an incumbency handicap — those already in power are much more likely to maintain their seats. They are more likely to be nominated for ridings where a party’s chances are already weak — the so-called “sacrificial lamb” theory identified by Melanee Thomas at the University of Calgary.
And, equally important, there are the barriers from within. Women are still less likely to put themselves forward for nomination; they may rebuff the first few attempts when they are approached. They cite as a major concern the loss of privacy that a life in politics entails. In 2015, the Women in Parliaments Global Forum produced a wide-ranging report called “The Female Political Career,” which revealed some of the common anxieties women experience: “While both men and women express concern about the many pitfalls of political campaigning, women are more worried overall, particularly about gender discrimination, the difficulty of fundraising, negative advertising, the loss of privacy, and not being taken seriously.”
They’re right to be worried. It’s a rough old world. As Julia Gillard, the first (and so far only) female prime minister of Australia, noted in a memorial speech for her murdered friend, British MP Jo Cox, gender hatred is simply a fact of life for women in politics. As a woman who’d been compared to a barren cow and been criticized for her physical appearance, she knew these issues intimately.
“Understand that you will encounter sexism and misogyny, and prepare yourself to face it and ultimately to eradicate it,” she said.
She noted that women in public life could expect daily threats of violence; rarely but horribly, as in the case of Jo Cox’s murder at the hands of a right-wing extremist on June 16, 2016, the violence online manifests itself in the real world.
Nor is there anything fresh in the misogyny: Gillard noted that the same insults that had been hurled at Hillary Clinton were also hurled at her. The U.S. presidential campaign was already a toxic river, the current gathering strength, when Gillard gave her speech: It showed “that this sort of gender discrimination isn’t set to leave us any time soon.”
A few months later, just before the U.S. election, comedian Samantha Bee sat down with some female heads of state to ponder the mystery of male hatred of female power. Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg talked about foreign diplomats assuming someone else in her entourage was the head of state, and Croatia’s Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović pointed out that her face had been Photoshopped onto an actress from a porn film.
At the time of Bee’s report, many still thought Hillary Clinton was likely to win: It’s instructive now to watch the report and see the animosity of right-wing TV hosts, who called Clinton smug and shrill, and likened her voice to a cat being dragged across a floor. Their fear is a skunk smell; it should have been obvious to all of us. Or maybe we’d just grown so used to that smell that it was just eau de business as usual.
In Ontario, the province where I live, the animosity toward Premier Kathleen Wynne, a gay grandmother, is astonishing. Her government fell into various murky pits on the issues of fundraising and electricity pricing, but the response to those political scandals was distinctly gendered, in her case. The sophisticated critiques of her government policy included such online gems as “wrinkly bitch,” “subhuman, dirty dyke,” and “lying, cheating cunt.”
At a press conference in early 2017, a reporter asked Wynne about these comments. First she paid lip service to voters’ right to freedom of expression, as all politicians do, but then, her voice rising, she made a connection between the abuse and the province’s future, a connection evident to any young woman with two eyes, a brain, and an Internet connection: “It discourages people from entering politics. And if I’m a woman — why would I do that? Why would I expose myself to those kinds of personal attacks?”
WHY, INDEED? Why, ladies, why? I’m actually pro-politician. I have trouble understanding the animosity and disdain we direct toward a group of people in whom we entrust many of the decisions that will shape our future. Why is wanting to be a politician a debased ambition, but going to business school is applauded by your gran and everyone in your high-school class? It makes no sense. Yet we continue to deride anyone who wants to seek public office. It takes a tough skin to admit you actually want to be a politician — and that hide better be made of titanium if you have lady parts.
One day in March, I venture to Queen’s Park, the seat of political power in Ontario, to find some answers to the puzzle. I’m here to meet with a group of young women who are potentially interested in a life in politics, if they don�
�t choose something more reputable, like used-car salesman or serial killer.
These young women are part of a group called Daughters of the Vote, a nation-wide initiative of Equal Voice Canada, which works to increase women’s participation in politics. In a dark, wood-panelled room that resembles an old-time gentleman’s club, I talk to these women about what brought them here, against all odds.
Azra is dark-haired and intent, and she’s studying political science at university: “When I meet strangers and I tell them I’m studying political science, they say, ‘Oh, politics?’” Her voice fills with sarcasm: “‘That must be so much fun.’” She sighs and shakes her head. “There’s such a taboo, especially around women in politics.”
The other young women around the table listen to her intently. They’ve all heard the same thing. Maymuna is chill and confident. The daughter of Somali immigrants, she’s studying health policy at a university in Toronto. “I’ve always had a passion for politics and social justice,” she says. “I thought this would be a good opportunity to network and get my foot in the door and learn more about what it is I want to do.”
For most of them, the political process is a mystery: This day is the first step to unlocking it. “No one ever tells you how to get into politics,” says Samantha, a teacher from Garden River First Nation near Sault Ste. Marie. “Today I heard you have to volunteer, and I was like, is that what we’re supposed to do? There’s no path or someone to help you through it. That’s a major barrier.”
If she does get into politics, Samantha says, it will be at a local level, perhaps on her band council. Micro-issues are her thing, the grassroots-level annoyances that plague her community: Transportation. Access to groceries. The other women all have pet issues they’d like to advance — gender-based distribution of public funds, immigration, paid menstrual leave. They are whole-heartedly aware of the systems of oppression they operate in, in a way that older feminists are, perhaps, somewhat deaf to. When Maymuna says “Anti-Blackness is a plague that’s everywhere,” the other women nod respectfully and listen to her analysis of the role that race plays in keeping women in her community from power. They are listeners. This, more than anything, may be the key to the future.
The future is a long way away: Equal Voice estimates it will take ninety years for the House of Commons to reach parity. Fully one-quarter of Canadians believe it will never happen. We will all be bitter dust then.
I’m not about to tell these young women that. They are already on trains bound for the horizon. Carly is planning to run for office as a school board trustee. She already works at Queen’s Park, as an assistant to a member of provincial parliament. She’s got a wealth of useful knowledge at her fingertips, such as the fact that women need to be asked to run for office an average of three times before they agree.
“It goes back to how we’re socialized,” she says. “We’re not taught that this is a career we might be good at.”
Across the table, Maymuna nods. She says that, right from the earliest days, she was taught to restrict her ambitions: “There’s no opportunity within the school itself, and without the opportunities there’s no way to build confidence. From day one you’re taught to lower your standards for yourself. You’re not taught to aim high.”
They talk among themselves, nodding and listening. These young women are not the products of private schools or privilege. Two of them grew up below the poverty line. If they end up at Queen’s Park one day, it won’t be because they thought they belonged here, but in spite of the fact they suspected they didn’t.
On International Women’s Day, they will travel to Ottawa, and along with other Daughters of the Vote from every federal riding in the country, take the seat of their member of parliament (the young women are all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three). For one symbolic moment, there will be a woman in each of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. Perhaps that’s exactly the right number. I’m reminded of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comment about when she thought there would be enough women on the United States Supreme Court: “When there are nine.”
How many is too many? No one ever bothered to ask: How few is too few? At least not until very recently. The British historian Mary Beard is someone who has made morally compelling arguments about women in political power. We deserve to be equally represented in the decision-making process, not to raise so-called “women’s issues” — which are really human issues — but because excluding half of the population is a waste of resources and acts against society’s best interests.
“It is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply can’t afford to do without women’s expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy, or social care,” Beard wrote in the London Review of Books. “If that means fewer men get into the legislature, as it must do (social change always has its losers as well as its winners), I’m happy to look those men in the eye.”
It is after lunch. The Daughters of the Vote have gathered to listen to three members of the provincial legislature — Conservative Lisa MacLeod, Liberal Indira Naidoo-Harris, and the NDP’s Catherine Fife — talk about the challenges they’ll face if they end up in elected office. There are the hours (brutal), the comments from social media trolls (even more brutal), the campaigns (so brutal), and the relentless attention to physical appearance (brutal and passive-aggressive).
“Why didn’t you put on some lipstick?” Lisa MacLeod remembers one constituent writing to her. “You looked terrible on TV.”
What happens if some of these Daughters of the Vote do make it into the legislature? For one thing, the hours will be more friendly: MacLeod arrived at Queen’s Park to find that the house sat until midnight when it was in session. Those are hours that suit barflies, not babies. MacLeod realized that “if we wanted this place to be more open not just to women but to young women, we had to make it more family-friendly.” Now the house rises at 6 p.m.
Each of these successful politicians is proof that it can work. They sold party memberships, fought for their nominations, found funding for their campaigns. Little by little, a different way of doing politics will emerge.
“We bring to the table a great deal of compassion and generosity, and an ability to work really hard,” says Naidoo-Harris. “And we’re very good at working with each other. We have the ability to be far more collegial.”
In other words, without too much unseemly boasting, they are changing the system from within. Creating opportunity where there was none before. Changing the face of things.
“My daughter called me a ‘difference-maker,’” Fife says, “and I thought, I can retire now.”
The young women in the audience smile and whisper to each other. All of them can relate to being teenage daughters, parcelling out reluctant praise to their mothers. Maybe some of them can see themselves here, one day, winning that praise from their own children.
The panels and discussion groups end. At the end of the afternoon, I say goodbye to the MPPs and prime ministers of tomorrow. I walk down a set of wide carpeted stairs, running my hand along the polished wooden bannister. The walls of Queen’s Park are hung with portraits of men who once ruled this place, all of them remarkably similar in hair colour (grey), skin colour (pink), and chromosomal composition.
I haven’t walked these stairs since 1989, when I was an editor with Hansard, the service that records all discussion in parliament and legislatures. I was fresh out of university. I rarely transcribed a female voice: There were twenty-one female MPPs in the legislature then, and all three party leaders were men. Now there are thirty-seven MPPs, and two of the party leaders are women — one of them is premier, the first in the province’s history.
That is progress, I tell myself, as the old grey men stare off into the painted distance. That is so much progress.
IF THE WORLD WERE MADE OF LEGO: A LETTER TO MY SON
Dear Griff,
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sp; I tried, I really did. When you arrived, I wrapped you in a white blanket, though I knew it was a bad idea to place a leaky infant inside a cocoon of snowy fabric. Blue was not your colour. You wore red and black and pink onesies. Mostly, you wore hand-me-downs.
When you were a toddler, I walked past the aisles of shirts that said “Tuff Stuff” and “Here Comes Trouble,” pajamas covered with astronauts and dump trucks, clothing that told you, at two, how you should be in the world — who you should be in the world. At Halloween, I dressed you as neutrally as I could, as a pumpkin, a dinosaur, a bear. When you were old enough to choose your own costume, you went trick-or-treating dressed as a bag of Skittles.
You were always your own person. For a while, I tried to steer you down the path of righteousness by buying you the kind of wooden, handmade toys approved by co-op daycares. You were indifferent. I bought you watercolours and a tiny doll called Polly Pocket whose clothes fastened with magnets. You enjoyed the magnets. I tried to interest you in imaginary play with stuffed animals, but mostly you regarded them with suspicion. There was one exception: Your grandmother, who had a facility for buying the most terrifying toys, presented you with a stuffed vinyl cob of corn with a serial killer’s smile on its little face. You played with that for a while.
I tried, in other words, to guide you between the peaks marked Boy and Girl. Perhaps it was a trivial exercise, but to me it was important. When the ultrasound told me that you were going to be a boy, I turned to the obstetrician in her plush Los Angeles office and yelped, “But I don’t know anything about boys!” She gave me a look that said, Apparently you know enough about them to get pregnant.
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