Thank you for your question.
This was a study that was done in the nineties by two Americans, Richard Matland and Donley Studlar, comparing Norway and Canadian provinces to see whether or not small parties that introduce a greater number of women in their candidate lists or as part of their candidate profile act as a contagion to force bigger parties to diversify the kinds of candidates they offer the voting public. In Norway, under that particular system, under those constraints, they did find evidence of that particular effect, but they didn't find similar evidence in Canada.
What this means is that Canada can have smaller parties that arguably aren't contesting for government because they're not able to win a plurality of seats or a plurality of votes that gets manufactured into a majority of seats. What it shows in the Canadian case is that the contagion effect we saw in Norway does not exist in Canada.
The reason I cited it in this particular context is to suggest that when people say proportional representation is good for women because it gives women greater access points, we can speak to studies that have looked at this function in an established proportional representation system and found it, but it takes a lot of logical leaps to suggest that we would be able to manufacture that same kind of effect in Canada simply by changing the electoral system.
I think the argument that's more plausible is to say that we have had parties that have been pushing for greater diversity in terms of who gets presented as a candidate to voters, but that this doesn't necessarily push other parties to do the same. For me that's the point. I don't see that changing how we translate votes to seats would actually change that particular part of Canadian elections at all.