Nicola Sturgeon at the 2015 SNP Conference in Glasgow. Photograph: Kevin Walker

Gender Equality in Politics - The Case for Positive Action

September 10, 2020

At its annual conference in Glasgow in 2015, the Scottish National Party agreed that it would implement a policy of all women short lists for prospective election candidates when an existing Member of the Scottish Parliament stood down.

However, there are periodically flare ups of anger and resentment among some members, men and women, against this.

I want to revisit some of the arguments and consider where the elements of thinking behind the animosity comes from.

Who is pissed off?

I think there are two main and mostly distinguishable groups of people who are pissed off with the idea of all women short lists though there may be some overlap between them.

Active anti-feminists.

This is by far the smaller of the two groups in terms of population numbers, but they are significantly more active in terms of purveying their messages. These are predominantly men who are not supportive of women, who are sometimes enraged by women and, at their worst, actively sexist, oppressive, and sometimes violent towards women.

They are often men who hark back to a putative bygone era when women knew their place, i.e. one defined for them by men. Some of them are fans of the likes of Jordan Peterson whose speciality is promoting the interests of toxic masculinity, often at the expense of women. At their most self-serving are the self-proclaimed Incels who claim that they are owed sex by women and that if they are Involuntarily Celibate, i.e. women decline to sleep with them, they will force the issue one way or another.

Donna Zuckerberg’s book shows how toxic masculinity operates on digital platforms.¹Zuckerberg, D. (2018) Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. London: Harvard University Press

This group of men will sometimes tolerate some women being engaged in public activity so long as those women do one thing. They must play along with the rules of patriarchy and capitalism and allow the boys to retain their power. They can do this by one of two means: Either they:

1. Play girly, girls, continue to butter up men, suck up their secondary status and generally oil the wheels of discrimination. Or 
2. They emulate a certain type of man and act bullish, economically ruthless and brutal. 

Otherwise, this group of men, generally think women’s place is in the kitchen or the bedroom and they are often angry or disgusted when women take a prominent role outside the home.

If campaigning feminists promote the interests of women beyond narrow confines, this group of knowingly sexist men will plot against them and try to bring them down. 

Good, decent, ordinary people

Good, decent, ordinary people who are in favour of equality of opportunity for all but who may not have been party to debates on the limitations of nineteenth century liberal ideas of equality.

This group is much bigger in terms of numbers but is much less vocal. 

Most Scottish people pride themselves, and rightly, for their championing of freedom, equality, decency, fairness and justice. Scotland fought liberation wars for freedom throughout the medieval and early modern periods. The Scottish Enlightenment led the way in terms of ideas about liberty.²That didn’t stop Scots being involved on a huge scale in the disgusting business of slavery in particular and brutal capitalism in general. I take those issues up elsewhere. Robert Burns poetry carried overt messages of equality. Scots were at the forefront of the radical movements for fairness and justice in the nineteenth century. The Independent Labour Party (forerunner of the Labour Party) was nurtured in the crucible of Scottish struggles for equality and decency.

The Wallace Monument. Symbol of Scotland’s desire for freedom. Photograph: Charles Mcguigan

One of the reasons Scots do not gravitate to the Conservative party is because the foundational belief of the Tories that screwing other people for gain is a legitimate and laudable way to engage in economic life does not sit well with the majority of them. 

So, Scots generally are very pro equality and apt to think highly of themselves on that score.

So, when somebody comes along and suggests positive action, hackles rise and people can feel that there is something shady and underhand going on. What, they ask, will happen if we water down our demand for pure equality? And they are right to be suspicious. But, in my view, they are wrong to fight against it.

Positive action

I first came across the idea of positive action in the late nineteen-seventies.³The term ‘positive discrimination’ was used at that time. That term has now been, literally, outlawed, and replaced by ‘positive action’. Before then, ‘affirmative action’ was the term introduced in the 1960s by the Kennedy administration in relation to race discrimination. It began to be implemented in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was adopted by Federal government in the 1970s following black power struggles.  The case was made for quotas to be put in place for women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities so that access to jobs in the universities I worked in would be made more available to them. My initial reactions were unease and scepticism. Of course, I wanted these groups to have a fair crack at everything. But I didn’t think this was the way to do it.

My main concerns were as follows:

1. An idea of unfairness. I have campaigned for fairness on many fronts most of my life. It went against the grain to consider messing about with fair access for all.
2. A perception of unfairness. I thought it would look like we were asking for special treatment when what we wanted was equal treatment and that that could be seen as undermining the case for equality.
3. I wanted to gain equality based on merit. If we went for a strategy that appeared to put that in question it would leave us open to accusations of having got somewhere without merit.
4. I was also a bit scared that white, able-bodied, men wouldn’t like that move and there would be a backlash. 

What changed my mind?

The short answer is numbers. And what they demonstrated about political will.

The statistics showed the huge and, importantly, disproportionate, gaps between employment and promotion rates for white men and those of all disadvantaged groups. And while equality legislation from the early and mid 1970s was making a difference, the rate at which it was making a difference meant that equality was likely to be centuries away. I and my peers were convinced. Various measures were put in place and positive action strategies were one of them. And they worked. They didn’t solve everything but they were one small element in making a difference. 

According to The Global Gender Gap Report 2020 it will take 95 years to close the gender gap in political empowerment. Of 153 countries ranked Iceland comes top and the UK comes 20^th. Scotland, unfortunately, is lumped in with the UK. The UK fell six places from 15^th to 21^st in terms of overall rankings for gender equality i.e. looking at health, economy and education as well as politics. No country has yet closed its gender gap.⁴World Economic Forum (2020) Global Gender Gap Report 2020  [Accessed 14th August 2020] UN, OECD, EU and UK figures paint a similar picture.

What’s the situation in Scotland?

In 2020 52% of Scotland’s population are women and 36% of MSPs are women. In 2003 39.5% of MSPs were women.⁵Engender (2020) Sex and Power in Scotland 2020  [Accessed 25th August 2020]

Following the 2016 Scottish Parliament election 43% of SNP MSPs are women. This improvement was achieved partially by means of All Women Shortlists in the case of eight new members. The figure was 27.5 % in 2011.⁶https://www.snp.org/policies/pb-how-is-the-snp-supporting-more-women-into-politics/ [Accessed 24th August 2020]

Of the current SNP UK parliament MPs 33% are women, a reduction from 34% in 2017.

By any reasonable measure it is estimated that we will be into the 22nd century before there is even a hope of women representatives reaching 50%.

I would be vehemently against all women shortlists if real equality was likely by not using them. If, in the current way of doing things, women were likely to get a fair crack at gaining equality I would not be advocating for all women shortlists but all the evidence shows time and again that that is not the case.

Are women a bad bet for election?

No. All available evidence suggests that women, once selected, are just as likely to be elected as men.

Winnie Ewing winning the Hamilton by-election in 1987

Are women bad at being representatives?

No. Again the evidence suggests that women do as well and occasionally better than men as representatives (although that depends upon which measure of effectiveness is employed). The Covid-19 crisis has been particularly telling in this regard with female leaders such as Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon hailed for their careful and caring approach compared to the gung-ho and dangerous stupidity of Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump.

Are women less likely to put themselves forward for election?

Yes. In the UK women were not allowed to vote at all until early in the 20th century. In 1918 women over thirty (who could meet a property qualification) won the vote, in 1928 all women over 21 were eligible to vote.⁷Only 58% of men were allowed to vote in UK elections before 1918. The Representation of the People Act gave women over 30 and meeting a property qualification the right to vote and at the same time gave the vote to all men over 21 and men in the armed forces over 19 (with no property qualification). Of 21 million voters, 8.5 million were women (this was at a time when, for the worst of reasons i.e. World War 1, women considerably outnumbered men in the population). The 1928 Equal Franchise Act equalised voting rights for men and women. People often say that women were ‘given’ the vote at those times. This is to massively misrepresent history. Women won the vote after over fifty years of increasing campaigning. In the US it took over seventy years. Women could vote on the Isle of Man from 1881 and New Zealand was the first country in which women (over 21) gained the right to vote in 1893.

There was, of course, no active Scottish Parliament at the time.

The first woman elected to the UK House of Commons was Constance Markiewicz in the General Election in December 1918. She was elected with 66% of the vote (versus a male opponent) for the constituency of Dublin St Patrick’s. As a Sinn Féin MP she abstained from taking her seat in the UK House of Commons and in any case would not have been able to as she was incarcerated in Holloway jail at the time. She subsequently became a cabinet minister in the Irish Dáil.

Women had fought throughout the nineteenth century for women’s rights. In particular, they had sought education. They had been up against influential men like Englishman Henry Maudsley⁸Maudsley, H. (1874) ‘Sex in Mind and Education’ Fortnightly Review Vol.XV. Maudsley’s name is celebrated in the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in South London., Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatry and Scotsman Sir James Crichton-Browne, a prominent psychiatrist and enthusiastic eugenicist who was President of the Association of Public Sanitary Inspectors for twenty years.⁹The Association of Public Sanitary Inspectors is a forerunner of the Chartered Institute for Environmental Health. Crichton-Browne was also at various times, President of: the Medico-Psychological Association; the Neurological Society; the Medical Society of London; the National Health Society and; the Eugenics Education Society. He was also Treasurer and Vice-President of the Royal Institution. See Crichton-Browne, James. (1884) Elementary Schools (Dr. Crichton-Browne’s Report). London. House of Commons/Hansard. Crichton-Browne, James. (1892) The Annual Oration on Sex in Education. The British Medical Journal Vol. 1, 7th May. Issue. 1636 pp. 949-954. They and many other male ‘experts’ argued that women’s physiology made them the weaker sex and that therefore they were insufficiently robust to cope with any but the most elementary of studies, women’s periods made them relatively ineducable, serious study would result in women having ‘nervous derangements and mortal diseases’ and that should women succeed in achieving education their reproductive systems would atrophy.

It is little wonder that women, hindered by these kind of ignorant white male attitudes, should find it difficult to suddenly see themselves as candidates for high office. We are still struggling against a heritage of idiotic ideas like these about women that have made equality an uphill struggle.

Women have been disproportionately held accountable for child-care, housework and sustaining family relationships so that they carry a much greater (and often hidden) burden than the average man. This has sometimes made things more difficult for many women to enter fully into the political arena.

And then when women arrive as new MPs in Westminster they have been subject to a braying, bullying and thoroughly toxic culture that tries to marginalise and disempower them. This is doubly the case for Black and other minority ethnic women.

Women who have been able to thrive in politics have often had to make huge personal sacrifices to do so and they are heroines. 

Mhairi Black, SNP MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South at the 2015 SNP Conference in Aberdeen. Photograph: Kevin Walker.

So yes, there are good reasons for women struggling to take their rightful place as political representatives.

Most political parties have begun to try to address these issues though some (The Tories) are slower than others.¹⁰Don’t let anyone tell you that Thatcher represented a forward step for women. Thatcher’s whole modus operandi was ‘I’m a better man than you are…’. The Conservative party has an ignoble history of having voted against every single piece of legislation supporting women’s rights for centuries.  

However, this is a slow process and, as noted above, it will be a long time before women can truly be said to be fairly represented in British or Scottish political life.

So – Positive Action.

Without positive action, we will continue to be unrepresentative and unequal. If you want women to be unrepresented and unequal then carry on arguing against All Women Short Lists but you will be

1. Holding back talented women from taking their rightful place in politics
   The argument that the best candidate should be selected irrespective of gender misses the point that great women candidates have been side-lined by sexist practices almost forever. However, the argument here is not that that should be redressed by some reparative action to make it up to women (although that is an argument that is yet to be had). Rather, the argument is that women are equally (and sometimes more) meritorious applicants but that positive action is needed to get them in front of electorates. Professor Curt Rice, Rector of Oslo Metropolitan University, has researched gender imbalance in Nobel Prizes, the sciences and academic life in general and has concluded that positive action is required. He has said:
   
   
   • The global academy draws disproportionately from the male half of the population. Assuming that intelligence is equally distributed across the entire population, this is a tragedy for science because it means we’re taking in weaker men where we could have stronger women. This is an immoral use of society’s resources, both in the sense that we underutilise the talents of women and that we spend money supporting work of a lower quality than it needs to be.¹¹Elmes, J. (2015) Q and A with Curt Rice. Times Higher Education Supplement. April 30th. article [Accessed 24th August, 2020]
     
   
   
2. Failing to work towards a target of equality for all
3. Falling behind the general trend in the global setting to create greater equality for women.
4. Siding with the dinosaurs who would see women sent back to the kitchen and the nursery. 

Positive action can take a variety of forms. All Women Shortlists are just one tactic to be employed in a wider strategy to promote gender equality and ensure that the best people are at the forefront of Scots struggle for self-determination.

They are a temporary measure to help eliminate the biases and unfairness of previous centuries and I will be at the front of the queue campaigning for their removal when equal rights are established.

Notes