Category Archives: Men supporting 50:50

Converted to Quotas: Johnny tells all!

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IMG_4536My name is Johnny and I used to strongly oppose the idea of gender quotas.  There I can admit it.  I was involved in party politics for many years.  I was of the system.  Once upon a time I even harboured hopes of becoming a TD myself.  I believed that candidates should be chosen on merit and that all was well with the system we had.  So you might ask what I did to prepare and educate myself for the task of being a TD, a legislator and a decision maker.  How did I go about starting to prove myself to those who would grant me the opportunity to put my name before the people?

Well I did what you have to do. You attend every meeting you can.  Every night of the week you will be going to something.  You make sure to say a few words at the meeting even if what you are saying is irrelevant.  You do not go home after the meeting.  You hang about, buy a few pints.  Cosy up to the people that matter.   If you are lucky you are either single or have a partner who stays at home and does the housework, leaves food out, looks after the kids, puts them to bed and accepts that you are not really around for most of family life.  You buy tickets, go to funerals, join the GAA club, the tidy towns, the drama group, the community alert committee, the school board of management and PTA.  If there’s a fundraising committee for something you make sure you are on it or supporting it financially.  You must be seen as a real community activist.  A go getter.  You stand over the biscuit tins; you shake the hands and get the picture in the paper.

That is how you become a candidate.  You will notice if you look at the professions of TDs many are either self employed or come from jobs with regular hours and flexible time to attend meetings.  Few executives or people who have to work late nights can afford the time to compete in this ‘milk round’.

I got out of politics.  When I did I saw things a little differently outside the bubble.  I began to research.  People like Claire McGing of NUIM have studied gender in politics in depth.  I found I could not argue with the figures.  The best I could muster was to suggest that the game just wasn’t attractive to women and that’s that.  I might suggest women didn’t want to do it and we had to accept that.  I found that argument weak though.  I began to think of many brilliant people I know who like politics but cannot run.

As my family grew I realised something else.  Our internal party systems have nothing to do with merit.  Merit would assess your ability to understand legislation, to contribute to policy, to debate, to inspire, create an image, to take decisions.  The system values none of those things.  We do not select leaders we select networkers.  The whole game is based on your ability to keep attending irrelevant meetings, functions and network in the bars, lounges and halls that it all takes place in.

Now sometimes a good leader is also a good networker and we get lucky.  Too often though we end up just selecting people because it’s their turn.  You know the type.  The 55-60 year old man who has been around forever and thrusts his leaflet into your hand listing hundreds of local organisations he has been involved in.

Until the 1960’s the male workplace had not changed much.  It was not a place that thought about family, there was no such thing as work life balance and your duty to the job came before all.  The advancement of women in the workplace changed all that.  They didn’t accept the old norms and rules and the way things always were.  Modern work is far more productive as a result.

Political parties have evolved informally around old male networks and habits.  You have to join this way of life to get selected.  Unfortunately women have suffered as a result.  For years women were expected to stay at home anyway.  Women venturing into pubs 7 nights a week would be talked about.  Women buying rounds of drink for men would be talked about.  I also have to admit that few of us men are willing to take a back seat to our wives.  When we are asked to put the kids to bed every night and be the support service we often get unhappy.  A female candidate recently told me that as she raced from a council meeting to get home to get the washing on and collect the kids from school a male counterpart told her she needed to get herself a wife.

I believe that Gender quotas are a good thing now.  I see them as a temporary measure.  A measure designed to create havoc and upset to this system.  They will do that so long as parties and individuals rail against them.  However, at some stage parties will have to accept its not changing.  As a result they will need to change how the party works.  Greater emphasis will need to be placed on the involvement of women.

This will mean changing the functions of grassroots from irrelevant meetings to real action.  Policy development, debate, and profile will all become the norm.  The party that wants to attract women will have to offer better opportunities for a grass root member to shine and prove their worth outside of having to attend stuff 7 nights a week.  They will have to provide a platform for someone to compete with the silent networkers and hand shakers.

We will all benefit as a result.  Many men who currently cannot abide this ‘milk round’ business but who would make excellent TDs will also take advantage of the new systems.  Candidate choice and selection will improve.  Eventually quotas will no longer be necessary.  Part of that is re educating the electorate.  We need people, especially women, who do not come from this ”milk round’ system.  We need them to prove that they can be strong TDs without all that nonsense and then voters will gradually seek out representatives based on different criteria.  It’s a long road, but not without its end.

I was once of the system.  When you are in it all you can see is how it affects you.  In truth I realise now that I was not thinking of my party or my country when I was opposed to quotas.  I was thinking of myself.  I was waiting on my turn to be a candidate.  I was worried I might lose out to a woman on the quota rule.  If I did what if she was good and retained her seat?  I might never get a chance again.

I had worked for years for this, playing the game.  Why should someone get there now just by walking in?  At no point was it really about who was the best TD.  All candidates have to believe they are.  At no point was it about any cause greater than me.  When faced with the harsh glaring reality of my own selfish narcissistic approach I realised I was wrong.

All the defences thrown up against quotas today about to one thing.  People who want their shot or people close to those who want their shot.  In the bubble it’s all about our candidate.  The party is second to that.  This should never be the case.  It is going to be a slow process.  I would still caution against trying to move too fast.  Let’s get to a point where we have parties fielding 30% female candidates with ease.  It’s not really a very big ask when you think about it.

Sadly parties have approached it incorrectly.  They are disorganised and only too happy to blame things on quotas when other electoral concerns and strategies are actually at play.  It’s a fight that is far from won but whenever in some happy day, it is, I firmly believe we will have a new system, more accessible and delivering higher quality candidates than ever before.  Weirdly, men will be among the big beneficiaries of this too as a growing number find the system mitigates against them now for the same reasons it has prevented women participating fully for years.

Quotas a step in closing the gender gap.

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This article by Margaret O Keeffe and Colette Finn was printed in the Evening Echo in Cork on Monday February 2nd 2015.

Political parties are gearing up for the General Election and for the first time they will have to implement gender quota legislation – 30% of party candidates must be female or they will lose half of their state funding. Currently, only one in six of our Dail politicians are female. The old rules basically entrenched a system that favoured those who were well resourced and without care commitments. It further socialised the excluded groups to see their absence as somehow their own fault.
The Oireachtas recognized gender imbalance as being problematic. They had two choices, accept the status quo that the overwhelming majority of Ireland’s elected representatives would be male or implement candidate selection gender quotes to force the political system to include the other fifty percent of the population – namely women. A majority of the mostly male politicians chose the latter.
The arguments that people should be elected on merit, what difference would it make, would that difference be better or worse, a female politician doesn’t necessarily represent ‘women’s’ views no more than a male politician represents ‘men’s’ views – these are all red herrings. In a properly functioning democracy those elected should be reflective of the population that it seeks to represent. Women are half the population and therefore should be half the representation.
The 5050 group was formed in September 2010 in the aftermath of a conference organised by fellow 5050 collaborators Dr Sandra McEvoy and Ms Fiona Buckley in UCC. At that conference Senator Ivana Bacik presented the evidence of how other countries had made significant progress in achieving parliamentary gender balance through the use of quotas. She cited Belgium and Spain.as examples. A group of us decided we were going to take action and lobby for the implementation of candidate selection gender quotas.
Fortuitously for the 5050 group a change of government occurred in March 2011. In July 2012 the Fine Gael/Labour coalition enacted The Electoral (Amendment) (Political Funding) Act 2012. This legislation will penalise all parties in receipt of public funding if they don’t field at least thirty percent of candidates of each sex in the next general election. Within seven years the quota rises to forty percent. With this form of quota all political ideologies are being encouraged/forced to pay attention to the gender balance of the candidates that they select. However this legislation does not apply to local elections.
The parties sought to implement a voluntary 30% gender quota in the local elections of 2014. However, the difficulties of implementing voluntary quotas became apparent – Fianna Fail fielded 17.1% female candidates, Fine Gael fielded 22.6%, Labour’s 28.9%, Sinn Fein 31.6% and People Before Profit did best with almost 40%. Dr Adrian Kavanagh of Maynooth University points out that Fine Gael will have the greatest difficulty in meeting the quota because they have the highest number of incumbent males. Fianna Fail will also struggle but they have fewer incumbent males. However because both parties didn’t implement the voluntary quota in the local elections they do not have the pipeline of experienced women in Local Government or the Senate from which to select suitable candidates.
Clearly, the introduction of the gender quota legislation in 2012 was very welcome. However women (and men) from less well-resourced communities may face similar obstacles in making the transition from small ‘p’ to big ‘P’ politics. The barriers to formal political involvement for women from less resourced backgrounds are complex. It also needs to be clearly said that men from these kinds of backgrounds are also substantially underrepresented in the formal political domain.
Certainly, many women (and men) both young and old make a huge contribution to community wellbeing through their voluntary engagement in schools, youth clubs, sports clubs, churches and so forth. They see and challenge inequality every day. They work hard to improve their own lives as well as those of their friends and neighbours. In this sense, they are politically active, but in the informal (small ‘p’), as opposed to the formal, (big ‘P’) political sphere.
At some stage in our lives, all of us will care or be cared for. Fundamentally, the provision of care is core to our physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, yet it is often provided on an unpaid basis. In addition, across Irish society, as elsewhere, it is still generally assumed by many people that ‘care’ is a ‘gendered’ activity, i.e. one done predominately by females. In other words, caring is women’s work.
In her article ‘Care-less Politics’ (2014), Mariz Tadros notes that the way politics is ‘done and run’ needs to factor in the ‘costs’ in every sense of unpaid care. Processes of deliberation and decision-making whether they are at the local government or at the national parliamentary level need to be highly sensitised to unpaid care responsibilities and how they impact on everyone’s capacity but particularly women’s capacity to participate in the formal political domain.
Clearly, as with gender quotas, efforts to address unpaid care are not a panacea for narrowing the gender gap in formal political representation. Addressing the issue of unpaid care, however, would help to ensure that more women stay in politics. It would also promote the idea that formal politics can be a viable and normalised career choice for anyone who also has care commitments, regardless of their socio-economic background. Furthermore, in the interests of a more balanced, happier society, ‘care’ should be a shared activity, i.e. one done equally by both men and women.
There is a need to adopt ‘an upside down’ approach to women’s political empowerment. However the academic and policy focus on getting the electoral system right so as to narrow the gender gap in the formal political sphere needs to be complemented with a ‘bottom up’ approach that critically interrogates pathways for less well-resourced women and men in political engagement.
Dr Colette Finn is Chair 5050 Group (Cork) and is a Carer/Economist with an interest in Nonprofit and Public sector businesses.
Dr Margaret O’Keeffe is a member of the 5050 Group (Cork) and is a Carer/Lecturer in Community Development in the Department of Applied Social Studies (CIT).