Evidence of meeting #108 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was nomination.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Prof. Sarah Childs
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.
Professor Rosie Campbell Professor, Politics, Birkbeck, University of London, As an Individual
I'll just add a few points to Sarah's, particularly around the approach to the recruitment of women candidates, which suggests a passive role for women or that women are not interested in politics and that's why they're not putting themselves forward.
There's increasing and very convincing evidence of a role model effect that women in politics can play to make young women more interested in politics, more engaged, and perhaps later on more likely to participate. There was a very famous study and experiment in India in which women were randomly allocated to be leaders in villages, and the effect that had on young women in those villages and on their parents' aspirations for their children was quite dramatic and fascinating.
The research would suggest that if parties are actively demanding women, be that through the use of a quota or because they are really actively seeking them, women realize it's a demand and actually become more engaged. Equally, when women see more women involved in politics, a new generation of women is more likely to come through, so you can create a virtuous circle, whereas when politics looks like a men's game, you have quite the opposite, a vicious circle.
I also think there's a real argument for the reputation-enhancing case for the introduction of a quota. Sarah and I were just on an expert panel for electoral reform for the Welsh Assembly. The Welsh Assembly has been at the forefront of the representation of women since it was first constituted, when it had one of the highest proportions of women members in the world. It was 50% at the time, but it's fallen back to the mid-forties. Our recommendation that they adopt quotas has been relatively positively received, we think, because of the fact that Wales has this reputation for being forward-thinking about gender.
I can see that Canada equally has a global reputation for being progressive and forward-looking. I think there's a real case to be made to Canada, having fallen from a higher position to 60th out of 190 countries, for actually making an intervention and making a statement that Canada's committed to gender equality.
Finally, there is Sarah's point about job-sharing for members. We did some research in 2013 and then followed it up last year, investigating the parental status of MPs in the British House of Commons, and we found a substantial gap between men and women, with more women MPs not having children.
One of the reasons we strongly advocate a quota-plus policy is that quotas are important to send the signal that women are welcome in politics and that they're wanted, and to create this virtuous circle. Equally we want a diverse group of politicians. For those who have caring roles and perhaps also for people with disabilities who find it hard to work full time, we think that in the modern world many employers offer the ability to people to work flexibly, and there should be a way for that to be possible for representatives as a group where we need a diverse group of people. That's why we're advocating job-sharing wherever we can.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio
Excellent. Thank you so much.
We're now going to move over to Melanee Thomas via video conference as well. She is from the University of Calgary.
You have seven minutes. Go ahead, Melanee.
Professor Melanee Thomas Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Calgary, As an Individual
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
I don't want to repeat many of the things that I think my co-panellists and others who are testifying might be inclined to say. Instead, I want to address what I think is the real root problem of all of these barriers, and that's sexism. I realize that's not a surprise to anybody, but we have some interesting work that looks at both explicit and implicit sexism. They're very different and they have different effects, so I want to make you aware of what we're finding.
The ultimate conclusion I draw is that overcoming women's implicit internalized bias against themselves acting in politics isn't going to do very much for women in politics in general if the far greater problem of explicit sexism in politics is not addressed as well.
When I say “sexism” in this context, I mean two things: it's a combination of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, coupled with a lack of power. Women in Canada are on average in about 26% of all elected positions across all levels of government. In things like local politics, it's not more friendly towards women in Canada. This combination of prejudice, stereotyping, and bias, plus this disempowerment, is powerful in a number of ways.
People who hold explicitly sexist views will tell us that they think men are naturally better leaders than women. They will tell us that women are too emotional for politics, or that women are too nice for the rough and tumble of politics. This attitude clearly relies on stereotypes and is only looking at gender as a reason to rule women out from political leadership.
We have work that shows that approximately 20%—or one in five—of Canadians hold these views. Men are more likely to endorse these views than are women. Older people are more likely to endorse these views than younger people. Most importantly, it cuts across all levels of education, so post-secondary education doesn't fix it. It's also present at the same levels in every single political party.
One point I want to make is that every single political party in Canada, by our data, has 20% of its members holding explicitly sexist views. This is going to have a real material effect on recruitment for candidates.
When we look at other forms of explicit sexism, we see they are focusing more on stereotypes about women, mothering, and work. These are people who reject the idea that women can work outside the home if they have children or can form a good bond with their children if they work. Again, men hold these views more than women do.
The implicit bias is very different. The implicit bias is unconscious. People don't say this out loud. What we're finding is that the implicit bias is a hesitation when people associate women or more feminine names with political power or political jobs. It's more unconscious in this context. The surprising thing is that we find implicit bias towards women in politics—against women in politics—amongst women only. Men don't exhibit it. Only women do.
For me, this is really profound. It says to me that a lot of women have internalized this explicit sexism they're seeing in the political system, and that in turn is driving down their political interest and their confidence in their ability to be a political actor and driving down their political ambition.
One of the things we find for women who don't have this internalized bias is that they are more interested and more confident, and they have ambition. Women who have the bias are not.
Explicit sexism has more material consequences, though. The implicit stuff drives down things that are going down with individual women, but explicit sexists are really critical of women candidates. In one study, we asked people to evaluate hypothetical candidates. We had four candidates, four profiles, and identical credentials in all of them. We just changed the names from Steven to Rebecca, and from Robert to Amy. When we changed those names and left all those credentials the same, people who held explicitly sexist views rated women significantly lower in terms of their competence or their perceived intelligence, their perceived likeability, and their perceived warmth.
This tells me a number of things about people who hold explicitly sexist views. They're not going to recruit women as candidates, or they're going to be a lot less likely to do it. They're less likely to mentor women, they're not going to support women as party leaders, and they may not even vote for women as candidates. Worse, though, they can see a woman who has the same credentials as a man and still think that she's less appropriate for a political job precisely because of this explicit sexism that they hold.
I also think that this explicit sexism plays into the idea that women's levels of under-representation aren't important as a political problem that we ought to be addressing.
There are some people who will say that it's just normal and natural for men to be overrepresented in politics and for women to be under-represented. It's these explicitly sexist things that in my view feed into that implicit internalized bias that we're also seeing in some Canadian women.
I see this show up in nomination contests. I had an earlier paper with my colleague Marc-André Bodet at the University of Laval. We looked at nomination contests between 2004 and 2011, and we found that nearly every single political party nominated a supermajority of women in districts that were unwinnable, but a majority of men either in districts that were competitive, where the campaign mattered, or they were in safe seats for their party. This pattern held for open seats, so we can't say that this is a problem with incumbency, and worse, it held for women incumbents, which means that women who already held seats in the House of Commons were more precariously placed than were their male peers.
I think parties and leaders need to acknowledge this pattern, and they need to acknowledge that all of them have explicit sexists in their ranks. What this means for parties and for organizers is that they actually should start saying no to candidates who volunteer or who are easy recruits from overrepresented groups. It means that leaders need to tell their organizers to find a set number of women to run. That number for parity in Canada is 169, so it's a low bar. If this sounds like a quota, I would simply point out that I would just call it the leader's prerogative. We all know Canadian party leaders get from their parties what they ask for. Every party leader has at some point asked for this and has received it, so don't call it a quota. Call it leader's prerogative, and just get the job done.
One thing I would be happy to speak about in questions is how this explicit sexism plays into online threats towards women. I agree with my colleagues that women need role models and that we could deal with this implicit sexism if we simply had more women who were elected into public office. All of the evidence shows that quotas bring in more meritorious women and displace mediocre men, so people concerned with merit shouldn't be that worried about a quota, and that you actually need to get close to a gender-equal parliament for those role-model effects to take place.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
Professor William Cross Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, As an Individual
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I have not had the privilege of previously meeting all of the members of the committee, so I'll briefly introduce myself. I'm a professor of political science at Carleton University, where I hold the Bell chair in Canadian parliamentary democracy. My research focuses on political parties, and for the past several decades I have been writing on questions of intra-party democracy, including leadership selection, candidate selection, EDAs, and the like.
As part of my research, I conduct surveys of party members, EDAs, and candidates. Many of you have completed some of my surveys; I thank you for that and I hope you'll continue to do so in the future.
In recent years I've explored the under-representation of women in political parties, and in my opening remarks I'll highlight some of the findings from these surveys.
First, in terms of different attitudes towards politics among candidates, we find a significant difference in terms of innate political ambition by gender. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. Among those who ran for one of the three major parties in the 2015 election, candidates were asked to indicate their level of political interest prior to first running for Parliament. Two-thirds of the men described themselves as being a “political junkie”, and they were 30% more likely to do so than were the female candidates. Similarly, men were 40% more likely to say that running for federal office was the next logical step in their political career, and on average, to have decided to pursue a life in politics at a considerably younger age than female candidates.
In short, the men were what I have characterized as “political entrepreneurs”, while recruitment was considerably more important for female candidates, who were significantly more likely to report that they were recruited to run by party officials at either the local or the national level.
Party nominations are, in my opinion, the key event in the process of getting more women into Parliament. Again looking at data from the 2015 election, we analyzed the number of women seeking nominations. With respect to the black box that was talked about, we actually do have data on the people who run for nominations and lose. When we examine this data, we find very little drop-off among the percentage of women seeking nominations, the percentage of women winning nominations, and the percentage ultimately elected in all three parties.
For example, with respect to the New Democrats, in 2015, 44% of all nomination candidates were female, as were 43% of the party's candidates. The numbers for the Liberals were 30% and 31%, and for the Conservatives, it was 22% and 20%. These numbers are very similar to those for the percentage of MPs elected to each caucus.
In short, there is little evidence, from 2015 at least, that party members are reluctant to nominate female candidates when they are given the opportunity to do so. In fact, in a significant majority of these EDAs, when a woman stood for nomination in 2015, a woman was nominated. The problem, to my mind, is that too few women are contesting these nominations.
Given this, in my recent research I've focused on trying to figure out under what conditions women are most likely to seek nominations. Of course, we know incumbent MPs are rarely challenged for renomination, so I will focus on open nominations and will share some of the results with you with respect to the three largest parties.
First, the presence of a local search committee is key. Associations with an active search committee are significantly more likely to have a female nomination contestant. While all of the parties, to varying degrees, have policies encouraging or requiring search committees, a surprising number of EDAs in all three parties, after the 2015 election and where they did not have incumbents, reported that they did not have an active search committee.
Second, having women in positions of power in the EDA matters, since they are both signals of openness to potential female candidates and potential recruiters of female candidates. This means having local association presidents, but it also means having female presence on EDA executives. In cases in which the local EDA president was a woman, in two-thirds of these EDAs at least one woman contested for the nomination in 2015. When half or more of EDA executive members were female, 62% of EDAs had a female nomination contestant.
The problem is that about three-quarters of EDA presidents are male, and most have a minority of female executive members. This is not surprising, as our surveys have consistently found that about six in 10 party members are male. This number has not moved since our first comprehensive survey in 2000.
There are a couple of other rather surprising findings that may be worth considering.
In recent elections, as you know, parties have been nominating more of their candidates earlier in the process, prior to the writ, than was traditionally the case. All three of the major parties nominated a significant number in 2014, a full year or more prior to the general election. Interestingly, even when controlling for all the other factors I've mentioned, there remains a significant relationship between the timing of the nomination and the likelihood of a woman seeking the nomination. EDAs holding their nominations in 2014 were significantly more likely to have a female nomination contestant than were those held closer to the election.
I must say that I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps it provides more opportunity for candidates to organize their personal lives in preparation for the campaign. We would want to do more research on this aspect.
Similarly, there is a significant relationship with the length of the nomination campaign. We find that longer contests are more likely to have a female contestant. Perhaps the longer campaign provides the appearance that there is not a favoured candidate and that the nomination contest is truly an open one.
To conclude, I would simply say that the parties are the key to solving this problem. I'll hang my hat with Sylvia Bashevkin, whom you heard in the earlier panel, and say that short of changing our electoral system or legislating quotas, neither of which I think is likely to happen, the key is for parties to increase the participation of women at all levels of their activities, particularly in positions of leadership in their EDAs, and to double their efforts at recruiting women to seek nominations. As we all know, there is no shortage of qualified and talented women in every community across this country who could make valuable contributions to their parties and to our parliament.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff
Thank you very much.
We'll begin our first round of questions with Mr. Serré.
You have seven minutes.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I also want to thank the witnesses for preparing and presenting their testimony today.
To recall the context, let us not forget that we are 60th in the world. That is truly disgraceful. This is a crisis and we must really find a way of shaking up the system. Some of the witnesses talked about that. In 2015, about 214 new MPs were elected. As Mr. Cross and other witnesses pointed out, statistically speaking, it is very likely that a large number of those MPs will be re-elected. There will be no more than 26% or 27% women in the next election, in 2019. There will hardly be any change if we do not take fairly drastic measures. I know quotas are not very popular, but I would still like to discuss factors that come into play. If we do not set a quota, we will have to see how people can be motivated.
What can we do to address this, Mr. Cross? You talked about the parties and another witness also mentioned the party leadership.
What can we do to legally mandate increasing the participation of women and to ensure that all parties play a more active role with respect to the act, Elections Canada, and the recommendations made to us regarding nominations?
Prof. William Cross
It's a difficult question around quotas. When we look internationally—there was talk about Ireland in the earlier panel—we have to keep in mind that they have a different system. They're electing three, four, or five members from each constituency. It's easier to impose a quota when the central party says to the local party, “You have to nominate at least one or two women each time.” We nominate one in each riding. You can't divide up one. I think that's the crux of the challenge.
Think back to Mr. Chrétien in 1993, who first started appointing a lot of candidates: the party was sued. We have a strong tradition of local party democracy. You all know better than I do the tension that can arise in your own parties when leaders try to influence events.
If we want to get more women involved at the local level, we could do some things. Parliament could provide financial incentives to local EDAs that have more women on their executive or to local associations that have gender parity in their membership. A lot of this happens at the local level, as you know, and we don't provide, except for some administrative aid in filing financial reports and accounting, any financial assistance to the EDAs. That could be one way we might try to get more women at the grassroots. I think we would then see that filter into more women seeking nominations.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
I like what you said about the riding associations, because there's absolutely no financial support for riding associations for a search committee to get more women, other than the will of the local individuals.
I want to ask the University of London something. In your experience with the U.K., have there been incentives, motivation, or financing to provide support to parties at the riding associations at the grassroots?
Prof. Rosie Campbell
We have the same problem you have at the national level. There's a lot of variation by party. The Labour Party has a much higher proportion of women MPs than the other parties do, and they use quotas. The devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales have much higher proportions of women because a number of parties use quotas. When we are describing incentives, quotas can be an incentive. Quotas can be about changing financial arrangements for parties. You could call it an incentive rather than a quota. If what you're concerned about is sending a signal to the whole country that Canada welcomes women politicians, why start just at the grassroots? Why not have incentives at the national level?
Do you want to add something, Sarah?
Prof. Sarah Childs
I think it needs to be a bespoke response in terms of your regulation of political parties and what your laws around parties actually enable you to do.
In the U.K. we struggle, because we don't have state funding of political parties, but where there is provision of funding to political parties, that can very easily be linked to party efforts. Then you can incentivize very directly in certain circumstances, where the regulation of political parties and where electoral law permits it. We often talk about rhetoric, promotion, and guarantees, but if you want that shock, then I'm afraid the unfashionable road to go down is quotas.
What we had in the U.K., as Rosie suggested, was permissive legislation—legislation that allows political parties to do that, but they don't have to. What that's created is this asymmetry amongst our parties. I guess the idea is that it should create competition amongst the parties to have higher numbers of women. Unfortunately, we're only seeing very slow improvements, particularly in our second major party, and I think that's because they are very reluctant to accept the logic of quotas.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
Ms. Thomas, you've commented on the nomination, but I also want to hear your thoughts. You mentioned about online and you mentioned role models. Can you expand on those two elements or give us some ideas around them? I have about a minute left.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
On role models, electing women makes more women interested in politics. That is straight up. We can find evidence for that throughout all OECD democracies. There's very clear evidence from Sweden, starting in the 1970s, that when a party started implementing seriously a voluntary party quota to get women elected, in subsequent elections women have been more interested in politics.
One of the things I want to push back against is that women just need more resources. I think women do need resources. Canadian women need child care. We need education. We need to be in these high-status occupations and things like this, but moving women into these positions doesn't actually decrease these engagement gaps that make women more interested in politics. What makes women more interested in politics is seeing more women do politics.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff
That's your time. Thank you.
We'll now go Rachel for seven minutes.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
My first question is for you, Mr. Cross.
Your research fascinates me. I'm wondering if you can comment with regard to reasons why women do not run or the barriers they would list. What are the top five?
Prof. William Cross
I would actually defer to Professor Childs and Professor Campbell, who have done more work specifically on that.
Professor Childs has written a fabulous report on making a more gender-friendly Parliament, which I think is part of it, seeing themselves in the role and thinking they can do it. Then I think Professor Thomas is right that seeing more women in Parliament makes them think that it's something that's open and accessible to them. That's where I think having more women on EDA executives and having a female EDA president is key. When we surveyed, one of the EDA presidents told us that one of their key jobs is to make sure they have candidates seeking the nomination. Women are more likely to seek out other women to be in those positions.
It seems to me from our data that the women who actually run are less likely to perceive themselves as being self-starters. They want to be asked. They want to be recruited in, as opposed to the men, who are much more likely to just see it as a natural progression in their careers.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Right.
From your research, and just based on your observations, would you say there should be diversity among the women who put their names forward, or should it be only one type of woman?
Prof. William Cross
No, no, there are questions of intersectionality. Sometimes it's a problem that we think of this dichotomously—man and woman—but absolutely not; there has to be outreach into ethnic communities, visible minority communities, lesbian and gay communities to make sure our parliament is representative of all the different facets of Canadian society.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Okay.
Melanee Thomas, I would ask you the same question. Is there space for diversity, or should there be space for diversity, in parliament?
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Well, why wouldn't there be?
For me, the most persuasive argument comes from Jane Mansbridge, who wrote a 1999 article in the United States entitled “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women?” Her answer was “yes”. Her argument was that all of these historically under-represented groups—groups that would have had legal barriers preventing them from participating—should have numbers in their representative institutions that match their demographic weight in the population, precisely because they are diverse groups.
Women are not a monolith. Women are 52% of the population. Of course there is great diversity among women, with any number across the ideological spectrum, across the economic spectrum, and across any kind of policy preference spectrum. The argument I would make is that our deliberative democracy inside parliament would be made better by bringing all of these diverse experiences forward into parliamentary debate. That is the real benefit, for me, in having a gender-equal parliament, for sure.