The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) and the Gender Quotas Alliance, a group of NGOs and academics advocating for the introduction of legislative gender quotas for local elections, has called on TDs to advocate “for the selection of women—preferably women from diverse backgrounds, including Traveller women and women of colour.”
The NWCI say that there is a need “for bold measures to support an increase of women in politics at all levels of government.”
In a position paper published by the NWCI, the Gender Quotas Alliance claim that such measures must include a commitment to ensure the adequate representation of minority groups “including but not limited to: Traveller women, women from migrant backgrounds, disabled women and women from the LGBTQIA+ community.”
The Alliance also called on TDs to bring about increased funding for political parties, councils, and NGOs-funding that is tied to outcomes in order to support women’s inclusion, “as for quotas to be effective, proper resourcing for engagement, capacity building, and training will be needed.”
Responding to the charge that it is undemocratic to introduce special measures for one group; the Gender Quotas Alliance say that far from being undemocratic, “quotas contribute to the democratisation of politics and also make the nomination or selection process more transparent.”
It further claims that women candidates, like men, “would still have to earn the votes of the electorate,” and that “having gender balance measures wouldn’t ‘hand’ seats to women.”
“Voters would still have complete freedom to choose who they vote for and in what order. In fact, introducing these measures would increase voter choice, by offering a more diverse range of candidates to choose from.”
Critics of gender quotas argue that mandating political parties to select people from “according to an inherent (but not actually relevant to the job) characteristic” could end up resulting candidates being chosen to fulfill legal requirements but who don’t have the support or experience needed to win – a discouragement to women, rather than the opposite.