Record numbers of women are standing for seats in the lower house, but it is likely that Saturday’s results will see little change overall in the number of women in parliament. We are in an environment where inequality is increasingly cited as a root cause of political shocks such as Brexit and the Republican nomination of Trump. These rumblings underline the imperative for governments to address inequality within their own ranks.
However, with two days remaining until the election, it’s clear that Australian women have been sidelined yet again.
The UN states the minimum level necessary for women to influence parliamentary decision-making is 30%. Going into this election, the proportion of women in Australian parliament teeters around that minimum, which is a marked deficit to the 50% proportion of women in the population.
Internationally, Australia has continued to slide down the rankings of women’s parliamentary representation and sits in 56th place, a drop of 35 places since 2001. While it may not be surprising to rank below the historically egalitarian Nordic bloc, it is confronting that women are now better represented in the governments of Burundi, Bolivia and Afghanistan. Despite being a country that was one of the first to enfranchise women, our political leaders have fallen into a torpor, reflected in the invisibility of women’s rights during this campaign.
We are living in an era of great opportunity, one that is ripe for historic progress in gender equality across the economic development spectrum. The momentous shift in political engagement with women’s rights globally indicates this election could have been a critical juncture for Australian women, but it has been fruitless.
In the US, the race is on for the most important public office in the world and Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues to explicitly address women’s inequality. Under Barack Obama, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act has been signed in, the White House has launched the It’s On Us campaign making sexual assault on campuses a national issue, and the United State of Women summit last month has galvanised public and private sector leaders.
Elsewhere, the UN has launched the global HeForShe gender equality campaign, while legislated gender quotas in politics and business continue to diffuse across the EU and Northern Europe. Organisations for women in male-dominated industries such as STEM, finance and entrepreneurship are ever-growing. Hashtags trending on social media reflect changing expectations of women – and men, across age, socio-economics, race and religion. It is clear that the demand for gender equality is gaining momentum, and it is the right time for our politics to reflect this.
At a party level, there is a disquieting silence on the glaring gender gap in representation between the major parties. The Liberal Party performs much more poorly than Labor or the Greens, with women comprising just 27% of this election’s pre-selection candidates. Labor has 39%, and the Greens 49%. This disparity is partly explained by party-specific institutionalised practices such as methods of pre-selection and cultural norms.
The most significant structural change in women’s representation was the Labor Party’s introduction of a 35% pre-selection quota for winnable seats in 1994, while further changes were made in 2012 with a 40% quota for women and men alike for the party’s parliamentary seats. The Greens, while a minority party, have always had a higher proportion of women candidates, traceable to their founding principles of equality. In contrast, the Liberal Party has long rejected quotas in their parliamentary wing, viewing them as anti-meritocratic. By effectively dismissing embedded structural and cultural biases against women, their expectation of progress has never materialised. Since 1998, the Labor Party has made strides in women’s representation for both candidacy and parliamentary seats, while the Liberal Party has barely moved.
This stagnation speaks volumes given the Liberal Party has been steadily losing the vote of Australian women for the last 20 years. This week, both major parties are projected to lose up to 20% of votes to minority parties including the Greens. The result is expected to be a close call, so the Liberals in particular are wasting a sorely-needed opportunity to appeal to marginal voters by addressing their representation gap and introducing women-friendly policy.
Since the campaign began I’ve been waiting to see what tidbit is offered to the female voter base and have met with nary a scrap. This isn’t to suggest that the women’s vote is monolithic, but there are major issues like the pay gap that appeal across intersections. For the Liberals, it’s also an opportunity to correct the alienating impact of Tony Abbott’s leadership, called out by Julia Gillard as “the definition of misogyny”. Admittedly, as minister for women, Abbott drew attention to violence against women, but this was perceived by some as a disingenuous way to offset his negative image.
There has been some improvement since that abysmal government, with Malcolm Turnbull’s cabinet including six women and the first female defence minister. However, there is clearly a cultural problem within the party when two of those cabinet ministers, Julie Bishop, the deputy leader, and Michaelia Cash, the minister for women, openly reject being associated with feminism.
For a party that recognises it has a problem with women, with a current leader who is a self-declared feminist, the Liberals are lacking decisive steps to improve outcomes. Encouraging girls to go into STEM is well and good, as is an “aspirational target” of 50% female parliamentary representation by 2025, but Turnbull has been curiously mute during the campaign on how exactly his party will improve gender equality both within the party and outside it. What could have been a newly revitalised Liberal Party fully supporting women’s equality is instead more of the same.
While representation of women is decidedly better in the Labor party, its policy for women is hardly inspired – $3bn in funding for childcare has been pledged as part of this campaign, but funding alone is an inadequate measure for such a complex issue.
Bill Shorten’s announcement also attracted a melee about his gendered framing of the proposal and its broader financial viability. It’s true that childcare is shouldered disproportionately by women and affects families across socio-economic circumstances. It is undoubtedly an important initiative to encourage greater female workforce participation and challenge social norms. However, it’s insulting to think this is the key avenue where women can be won over. In fact, it assumes women are mothers first and foremost, perpetuating a stereotype that women will care most strongly about family over other issues. By lacking other policy measures to further women’s equality, Labor has put us squarely back into the separate sphere of the home.
While full inclusion in the political realm is not simply a matter of filling seats, women need to reach a critical mass in order to make a visible impact on the style and content of political decision-making, according to the UN.
We need more women in parliament, and we need policy to reflect rapidly growing demands for equality. It is the bipartisan responsibility of the Australian political leadership to progress the equality of the voters who comprise half of the constituency. It’s what the democratic process should stand for.
Instead, this election has been a squandered opportunity for closing the political gender gap, and it’s clear that after this Saturday we will be stuck with another gaping shortfall.
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