Thank you.
First of all, Rosie and I very much welcome this opportunity to feed in to you our British-based research and wider thoughts.
We want to make three very broad points about women's under-representation.
The first point we call the “quota-plus” strategy. There are clearly interventions that can address the supply side and the demand side of women's under-representation, but the global evidence is very strong that really it is quotas that increase women's representation in politics. Whilst they're often unfashionable and quite often contested, they are mechanisms that have increasingly been proven to work, particularly when they are incentivized, and therefore parties see that it is very positive for them to adopt them.
There's a difference of about 10 percentage points between countries that use a sex or gender quota and those that do not. In countries where women members make up more than 30% of Parliament, over 80% use some kind of quota. I think in this discussion, it's always important to put that on the table. Often it's too easy to buy into criticisms of quotas, when increasingly they're proven to be mechanisms of party behaviour in this respect.
We call it a “quota-plus” strategy because it's also really important to maximize the supply pool of women, and particularly to diversify the supply pool of women. It's important, in our view, that we don't just increase the numbers of women who put themselves forward but also make sure that those women are themselves representative—particularly in terms of the ability of women with lesser financial resources to participate in politics, and in terms of ethnicity—to ensure that we have representative women as well as a representative parliament.
It's also very, very important that we not give up on the demand side. Parties are often resisters to change and often don't wish to respond positively to interventions. We feel very strongly that parties need to be encouraged—dare we say incentivized, and sometimes penalized—to increase their women. It's very easy for parties to be rhetorically in support of greater numbers of women, but it's become increasingly the case that people won't speak in public about it, or they are more likely to agree that there should be more women than to actually put their party resources behind that idea.
I noticed in your last panel that there were questions around financing of candidates. Again, we would support that. Parties need to think about what they do, how they define the ideal candidate, and also what provisions they have to make politics something that ordinary women do ordinarily. I think that's where we would want to start.
That's our first point, a quota-plus strategy, and the second follows on from that. It's about the concept of party recruitment. Asking her to stand is a very easy thing to say, but we're concerned that sometimes that looks as though it's blaming women for not putting themselves forward. Asking her to stand really means that parties need to think about “recruitment” as an active verb. Parties need to change and go out of their way to recruit, not just assume that saying to women “Please stand” means that they'll necessarily be able to take up that invitation. Parties need to make themselves attractive as a place where women wish to participate.
Our third point is about parliaments and how these could be made more gender-sensitive. I will talk about two points and then pass this over to Rosie.
First, we feel very strongly, for both symbolic and substantive reasons, that parliaments need to ensure formal and transparent provision for members of Parliament to take maternity and paternity leave, and indeed adoption leave. This shows that Parliament is a place for people who have families. We feel very strongly about it. In the U.K. we noticed a motherhood gap a few years ago. We're looking now to see whether that gap may be declining. We need to make Parliament a place that is suitable for those members who have caring responsibilities.
On the basis of my report “The Good Parliament”, I really feel that parliaments should be subjecting themselves to a gender-sensitive parliament audit. The Inter-Parliamentary Union has a framework that can be applied. They will support parliaments who subject themselves to an audit. Of course, a parliament can do this themselves, using their own parliamentary clerks and other academic inputs. They're really to conduct an audit that identifies where a parliament isn't sufficiently sensitive to gender and, I would argue, other diversities.
Often, parliaments haven't thought about what different kinds of members of parliament need, because overwhelmingly they were set up by men and have been filled predominantly by them.
Therefore, it's maternity leave and paternity leave for MPs, and a proper audit. Also, Rosie and I are very much in favour of providing the possibility of job-sharing for MPs.