In her words

On a worldwide level, this pattern is repeated: of the five countries in the world who have 30% or more female parliamentarians in their single or lower house (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands), three have a proportional electoral system, and two have a mixed proportional electoral system. None have a majoritarian system. Of the eight countries that have 29-25% female MPs in their lower or single house (New Zealand, Seychelles, Austria, Germany, Iceland, Argentina, Mozambique and South Africa), all have either proportional or mixed proportional electoral systems. Again, none have a majoritarian system. In contrast, if one looks at the lowest worldwide level of female political representation, a far higher proportion of countries with 10% or less women in the lower or single house of Parliament have a majoritarian electoral system, and nearly 90% of countries that have no female parliamentarians using a majoritarian system.

Dr Joanna Everitt, Dean of Arts at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and a Professor of Political Science specializing in women and politics, is now a visiting fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University. She says that if Canada were to switch to a Proportional Representation voting system (PR), then in the very next election our percentage of women MPs would jump by at least 10%.

But why does it really matter if we elect more women to government?

First, attitudes differ by gender. Separate studies in Canada, the UK and the USA show that female politicians (as with women in general) tend to care more than their male colleagues about social welfare issues such as health, education and poverty. Conversely, male politicians tend to care more about economics, the military and foreign affairs. Put both genders together, and we have it all covered. Of course there are many examples of women and men who don’t fall into these generalities. The sexes have more in common than not. Still, small differences of 5 % – 15% in attitudes of MPs can cause big differences in government legislation and policy.¹

The second reason why we need more women to help make the laws that rule society is that their experiences differ from men’s. Women still do the most childcare and eldercare; they do more than half of the housework (a time commitment); they experience the workplace differently (require more leaves, experience more harassment, have not broken the glass ceiling); they make less money; and they are far more apt to be the victims of family and sexual violence. We need the perspectives of women to develop legislation and policies that deal more fairly with these areas of life. In fact, almost all areas affect women differently, from taxation and pay equity to divorce law.

Third, women and men tend to use different leadership styles. Even today, we equate strong leadership qualities with typical male behaviour. Rt Hon Kim Campbell points out in Menocracy that men tend to challenge, take strong positions and favour a hierarchy of power. Women, who have been taught all their lives to cooperate and negotiate, tend to like power-sharing and consensus-building styles of leadership, now embraced by the IT sector. Neither one is better, but having a mixture of leadership styles makes for better government.

Finally, because women leaders tend to negotiate longer than men when it comes to military decisions, the world stage will change when half our leaders are women. Kim Campbell puts it well: “Girls are not socialized to have certain kinds of bravado and physical courage, etc, defining them as members of their sex in the way that boys are. So I think the value that women bring is that they don’t have the same ego needs to be seen as tough in that way…. There’s no ‘gonad-al’ fortitude required to be shown, and I think for that reason women are much more comfortable looking at all of the options and trying to see through the rhetoric and the excitement that comes from the possibility of violence.” For many crucial reasons society needs equal numbers of women and men making the rules and policies that so affect us.

How does PR voting create governments that better reflect society, not only with more women, but with more minorities? It’s simple. PR provides natural incentives for parties to give voters more choice. This means each major party will give voters the choice of more than one candidate on their ballot. As soon as they present more than one candidate, the incentives offering the public balance and diversity start to operate.

Substantial research has been conducted comparing outcomes in countries using winner-take-all systems vs proportional systems. Arend Lijphart (2012), a world-renowned political scientist, spent his career studying the differences between majoritarian and “consensual” (PR) democracies. In his landmark study – Patterns of Democracy – Lijphart compared 36 democracies over 29 years, and found that in countries using proportional systems elected women to parliament 8% more than majoritarian (fptp) systems. He has stated that “the representation of women in parliaments and cabinets is an important measure of the quality of democratic representation in their own right, and it can also serve as an indirect proxy of how well minorities are represented generally.”

Lijphart sums it up best when he says, “Political equality is a basic goal of democracy and the degree of political equality is therefore an important indicator of democratic quality.” At our current rate of growth it will be close to 100 years before Canada has equal numbers of women and men in parliament and legislatures. Let’s accelerate this by demanding we catch up to the rest of the democratic world and switch to a system of Proportional Representation to make ALL our votes count!

1. Interviews with Dr Joanna Everitt, Dr Susan Carroll (CAWP, Rutgers, USA) and Dr Rosie Campbell (Birkbeck, UK) in Menocracy.