Of the 174 members of the incoming 34th Dáil, 43 will be female. This represents a percentage of 24.7%, and a very marginal increase over the 22.5% of members of the outgoing 33rd Dáil who were women.
This minute shift in the gender balance of the national parliament came about after a new law was introduced mandating that political parties who sought state funding should have at least 40% of their candidates be women. All parties met that target. But the voters disproportionately chose men anyway. If you were a man running for any political party, you were statistically more likely to be chosen. Why is this?
The simplest explanation – and therefore the one most likely to be favored by our friends on the political left – is that the voters are sexist. Yet the performance of Soc Dem leader Holly Cairns alone, in a rural and conservative constituency, would tend to cast doubt on this interpretation: She was pregnant, unable to campaign during the election, and gave birth on polling day. Voters rewarded her with an almost-poll-topping performance anyway.
Similarly, Jennifer Carroll-MacNeill comfortably topped the poll in her Dun Laoghaire constituency, Verona Murphy and Carol Nolan cruised home in their bailiwicks, and Rose Conway-Walsh of Sinn Fein dominated the first count in Mayo. If there was some kind of systemic sexism, one would not expect to see so many poll-topping performances from women across the political spectrum.
The more uncomfortable explanation, and yet the one that seems obviously correct, is that in their haste to fill their gender quota targets, parties simply selected a lot of women who just aren’t that good at winning elections.
This has always been the criticism of quotas, be they gender quotas or racial quotas or any other kind: If you are mandated to select people from a small pool according to an inherent (but not actually relevant to the job) characteristic, then your overall pool of candidates is reduced and you end up selecting lower quality candidates on average.
This is not to say – though someone will doubtless try to misinterpret me – that the average woman is less suited to politics than the average man. It is however to say that the pool of sufficiently talented women who are interested in a career in politics remains much smaller than the pool of sufficiently talented men. And no law, of God or man, can make people interested in politics if they are not.
In any case, there is precious little evidence that the voters draw much distinction between candidates based on their gender. For all the exit poll asked people why they voted the way they did, there was little evidence that any significant proportion of the population was basing their vote on whether a candidate was male or female. Party manifestos, and a broad desire for change or continuity, seem vastly more important to voters.
Ironically, of course, the voters had a vast array of choices to make on the ballot paper when it came to gender diversity. Every constituency had at least two female candidates. This was not the case when it came to ideological diversity. The big parties may have been compelled to be diverse in their gender offerings, but they certainly were not diverse in their policy offerings. So, on the stuff that really mattered to voters, there was no law mandating diversity. On the stuff that didn’t matter to them, they were offered 40% of the candidates. Is it really any surprise then that they said, in large numbers, “we’ll pass”?
This actually is easily understandable if you imagine a situation where diversity was mandated for some ideology. Imagine we had a law that mandated that 40% of candidates were communists, and another 20% were fascists – do we think that fascists and communists would combine for 60% of the seats? Of course they would not because voters will still vote on what matters to them, not to what matters to the political system.
Ultimately, the way to get more women into politics is to nurture and promote the talented women who seek political office. One way to nurture and promote talent is by subjecting it to competition: A woman who wins a competitive selection convention is going to be a better candidate than a woman added to a ticket without a fight because party headquarters needs to meet a quota. That should be blatantly obvious to anybody who knows the first thing about life, let alone politics.
As things stand, we have a law that essentially mandates the parties to pick women just because they are women, and toss them onto a competitive battlefield against seasoned male campaigners who have had to fight their way onto the ticket. It is, in many cases, like tossing a team of amateur pub players onto a field against a premier league side. The level of experience and competition guarantees a particular result.
This doesn’t help women, and it doesn’t improve our politics. The stupid quota law should go.