Irish parliament passes female quota bill
Laura Mowat
WVoN co-editor
A bill has passed in the Irish parliament declaring that unless 30% of parliamentary candidates are females, half of state funding will be withdrawn from political parties.
This stems from the country’s poor record of attracting women to put themselves forward as parliamentary candidates. Currently, 15.1% of Irish members of parliament are women.
The quota will rise to 40% female candidates after seven years.
The Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogel, said that a financial penalty was the only way for the parties to take the issue seriously.
Deputy Nolan said: “The introduction of gender quotas for nominations will change the dynamic in the Dáil [Irish parliament]. I hope it will create a new atmosphere that will spread to other areas of society.”
Chairwoman Edel Clancy suggested the quotas be extended for local elections in 2014.
“International research continually shows that candidate gender quotas are a successful contributor to increasing women’s political representation worldwide,” she said.
However, the Women for Election group have claimed that this legislation would not be enough to fight the unbalanced ratio, and the lobby group has suggested mentoring and training to encourage women to stand to be members of parliament.
In the UK parliament, 22% of MPs are female. It is believed that childcare, cash and confidence are among the reasons that far fewer women are in governments worldwide.
Wouldn’t have anything to do with most guys ambiguous attitude to women with opinions would it? As Laurie Penny noted, women that speak up or out about anything to do with their half of the populations welfare tend to find they’re treated with indifference at first and then outright hostility. Trolls aren’t just an internet phenomenon.
I really don’t get this….Surely if women aren’t right for the job and they don’t want to do the job, then they should just leave the men to carry on? What if the political parties can’t find enough women to fill these quotas?
I suspect that the problem isn’t with women not being right for the job or wanting the job, its a way of forcing men to share power rather than having all male candidates lists.