Power to women, not women in power
In the Guardian’s A woman’s place series, Lesley Abdela laments the paucity of women in parliament.
Eighty years on, the UK parliament rates 69th in the world league of women in parliament, one ignoble place below Cambodia.
Women’s representation in politics is not linked to whether a country is rich or poor. The US has 16.8% women representatives. Japan has 9.4% women in the Diet. Rwanda, with 48.8%, and Sweden, with 47%, have the highest representation of women in any parliament in the world, versus the UK at just over 19% women MPs.
The reasons behind this dearth don’t seem to be addressed, but what is important is the emphasis put on the female quota.
Jackie Ashley argues that the presence of women in Parlaiment is necessary for the passing of gender equality laws. In charting all the progress towards gender equality during the Blair/Brown years, including Sure Start, improvement in childcare, the filling of the gender pay gap, and measures by a woman, Harriet Harman, to help more women get jobs, Ashley puts this necessarily all down to women MPs.
Might the men have got there alone? I doubt it, because women MPs have themselves experienced how hard it is to juggle work and family, making them much more forceful in agitating for new laws. They have also lobbied women journalists, in the unofficial circles that exist at Westminster, to push such issues up the political agenda.
But surely gender equality should be encouraged in everyone, rather than making it only something women can understand? Ideally it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a man or woman if you support equality for both genders. It is counterproductive to assume that only women can push for their rights, and superficial to assume that the presence of women in power is a good measure of the equal status of women in society. Women’s rights should be espoused first and foremost by men, and we shouldn’t assume that a woman will fight for the parity of her sex by default.
It’s high time we treated this issue with gravity and seriousness, rather than addressing it with reactionary politics. We can get rid of the term Blair Babes for a start.
I remember an article on PP against closed lists based on ethnic minority candidates. I wonder if some bloggers who railed against ethnic minority lists will also come out against favourable treatment of the fairer sex in the constituencies?
Fair enough, but isn’t all of this a distraction from the fact that this:
[X] [X] [X] [X] [X] [X] [X] [X] [X] [X]
…does not equal democracy by any stretch of the imagination? (The above is your lifetime supply of “democracy”, in case you were wondering.)
The crumbs of power we get - in which we get to put a cross in a box about ten times in our lives - does nothing but take power from us all, and cloak it in “legitimacy” so that a bunch of self-serving parasites can claim to have a mandate to rule over us.
Or that whoever is supposedly “in power”, the apparatus surrounding them (bureaucrats, military, big corporations) remains exactly the same anyway, so it doesn’t actually make a fat lot of difference at the end of the day. (Of course, some of them are nastier than others, eg. the BNP - but even they are a distraction from the fact that we already live in an utterly fascist state.)
The women in parliament have just as little right to rule over us as the men! Get rid of the whole stinking lot, and let’s get some real political engagement happening (direct democracy, consensus decision making, real social justice), because voting doesn’t even come close to having a say in how our lives are run.
This redistribution of power will never be allowed to happen - it barely even gets talked about, thanks to the pathetic sideshow we’re encouraged to focus on in every “political debate” we ever encounter!! We’ll have to take power back for ourselves, and even then it’s not going to come easily.
So all I’m saying really is that parliament and elections are a sham, and that we don’t have any say anyway, so what does it matter if the malevolent robots in Parliament have male or female genitals?
They’re still malevolent robots, and they’ll still never have our best interests at heart.
I wonder if some bloggers who railed against ethnic minority lists will also come out against favourable treatment of the fairer sex in the constituencies?
Nope, I’m for all-women shortlists. and if you read my reasoning for opposing shortlists (primariy ghettoisation), I don’t think the same argument applies.
Well, then again you have stories like the one the other day, about how a number of Welsh Assembly Members said they had been raped and experienced domestic violence, but not reported it to the police. And the vast majority didn’t return the survey - only one man answered the questions. Interesting statement on the priorities of the representatives, no?
While gender stereotyping and inequality has a negative effect on everyone, some are more affected than others. And some people do actually benefit from the unfair power structures in our society. I think that a House of Commons full of the white, male, middle classes is just never going to be as tuned into some of these issues, or see them as a priority.
So, well, I think there is a strong argument that Parliament should be around 50% men, 50% women, because in the real world men have different life experiences than women, and you betcha they take that with them into their political lives. A good MP is able to represent all their constituents, regardless, but MPs are only human.
It’s a question, too, of representation. The Fawcett Society recently produced a map, demonstrating how many constituencies have never been represented by a woman, how many elections since suffrage? Since the first female MP?!
Bearing in mind that, yes, it would be nice to evict the lot of them and start again, this isn’t exactly something that’s likely to happen. In the meantime, shouldn’t we push to reform the institutions we do have?
The reason that men get returned in greater numbers than women may be a reflection of our wider culture, but I think change has to happen somewhere - and a representative House of Commons would be a good start. Of course, this is even less likely than proportional representation, so there’s a bit of head>brick wall here.
I agree with this though!
Or that whoever is supposedly “in power”, the apparatus surrounding them (bureaucrats, military, big corporations) remains exactly the same anyway, so it doesn’t actually make a fat lot of difference at the end of the day
disagree with this post. if quotas are one end of the spectrum, having a very low percentage of women in parliament is at the other extreme.
i don’t think that there’s any doubt that the culture and means of political participation can encourage or discourage women from standing to become mp’s. given the uk is a representative democracy it isn’t unreasonable to expect that women make up 50% of mp’s.
having said that i think you need a change in culture rather than forced quotas which will be much harder to achieve.
shariq, I don’t think you and Ala are that far apart from each other on this, I’m the one who’s for women only shortlists.
You say we need a change in culture. Agreed. But it’s a pie in the sky statement - we’ve had equal rights for decades, how exactly does the change in culture come? Its a chicken and egg situation - couldn’t the change in culture come through quotas and then phased out? I think a lot of feminists have a right to be frustrated at the slow rate of change.
Yeah? I just think we need a totally different way to look at power and responsibility in large scale society.
I disagree with Sunny at 3 given that both ethnic minority and all women lists empower groups who otherwise could never aspire to such heights because of institutional and structural impediments.
If ghettoisation of communities is a concern this is more about ‘push-pull ‘ factors and tends to be as much economic as anything else. Conservative rightwingers can just as easily argue against enforced women candidates on the grounds of experience, competency and democratic choice of local constituencies. Women candidates could be just as divisive with their own agendas perceived to be benefiting only a section of their constituents. This is why those supporting equality should support both ethnic minority and all women lists.
sunny, on balance i think i’m more towards your side of the argument.
positive action is definitely required. having said that there must be more imaginative solutions than all-women shortlists.
what about ensuring that all local labour party clubs having minimum 40% women or something along those lines although i’m in favour of open primaries anyway.
Jess @ 4:
I used to think like that, but really, when you look at the way things are set up - whether it’s by design, or whether it’s by accident - it is never going to be possible to reform the structures of power that exist in society. You can’t reform something that is organised to be unreformable, and is surrounded by other structures which would make sure that should any sort of “reform” ever actually happen, it will have zero impact anyway.
Have you ever tried to give away your power to do something - even something small? Giving away power is pretty difficult, even when you really want to do it. Most politicians are more than happy to amass as much power as possible - indeed, it’s undoubtedly the reason so many of them are there in the first place. They will not reform away their power in a million years!!
Government is unreformable, and therefore, we have to just kick it until it breaks.
davebones @ 7:
Well, it depends who’s definition of “power” we’re talking about.
Max Weber thought power was the ability to get other people to do what you wanted them to, even if that wasn’t what they wanted, and even if it wasn’t the best thing for them. His idea of power pretty much equates to “domination” or “force”.
Hannah Arendt on the other hand though that power existed between people, and was what happened when folks got together to change things. For her, real power (as opposed to “force”) was all about co-operation.
The two are in conflict, obviously. Weber’s definition of power must annihilate Arendt’s if it is to win.
This is why solidarity with others who are struggling is so important. Because otherwise, as Jay Gould (19th century US railway baron) said: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Divide and conquer is what the current structures of power (Weber’s type) are all about.
Encouraging us to hate people on welfare benefits (”they’re taking our taxes” - but no mention of the massive amounts of corporate welfare payments which make stacks of cash for the rich and dwarf the former), to hate immigrants (”taking our jobs” - utter bollocks), asylum seekers, Muslims, muddying the distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters, you name it. There’s always fear of “the other” to be stoked, and damn do they know how to stoke it!
Or confusing the definitions of words like “anarchy” (meaning: nobody in charge, real equality, mutual aid, support and respect for all) and making it synonymous with “disorder” and “chaos” - a deliberate tactic, to make real anarchy unthinkable.
What am I getting at? I think this stuff isn’t even on most people’s radars. Or maybe it is, but they’ve been conditioned not to think about it too much - not to question it, or ever consider that if we wanted it enough, we could really make it happen.
Instead, we get drawn into debates about the percentage of women in parliament, or the percentage of ethnic minorities in parliament. While I’m not knocking the importance of creating equality wherever possible, if you put it in the context this debate is occurring in, it’s simply tinkering at the edges.
Does it make one iota of difference if the people steering a fundamentally inequal, repressive and disempowering system are a shining beacon of equality and empowerment of minorities themselves? Does it heck!
It’s just a convenient distraction from a much more serious question: why on earth ANYBODY is allowed that much power in the first place!
We have to train ourselves never to lose sight of that, but the bullshit mill is so strong it’s not exactly an easy task.