Sir, – Indeed as Anthea McTeirnan (Opinion, March 9th) points out, “the statistics rattle off the tongue”. Unfortunately, since the passing of Garret FitzGerald the analysis and interpretation of statistics at The Irish Times has been a few standard deviations below average.
The Electoral (Amendment) (Political Funding) Bill 2011, which requires that 30 per cent of (party) election candidates must be women by 2016 is presumably being enacted because of a belief that the main political parties are somehow institutionally biased against women in their present selection procedures. I am wondering if this is fair; also I am wondering if it is fair to ask the Tánaiste to step aside in order that a 50:50 gender balance be established.
In examining the evidence I have considered the available gender data for the 2011 general election. We can take Independent (ie non-party) candidates as a control group since there is no selection process, hence anyone can become an Independent candidate and gender quotas (official or unofficial) or gender bias cannot apply.
The data shows that only 8 per cent of the 176 independent candidates were women. One conclusion we can draw from this is that women are more than 11 times less likely to bother applying to become candidates. This is despite the fact that any individual woman is at least as likely to be elected. (indeed probably more likely based on 15 per cent (female) compared to 6.25 per cent (male) success rate for the control group). Comparing the main parties to the control group, we find that women in all the main parties are more likely to seek election than the control group, ranging from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael at 15 per cent (a factor of two) to Labour at 26 per cent (a factor of >3).
Conclusion: All the main parties have had considerable success in persuading and facilitating women to become candidates.
Now looking at the Labour party in a little more detail. I have had difficulty in finding a reliable figure for the number of women members of the Labour party but one source puts it at only 4 per cent of the party membership. This seems quite shocking (even unbelievable) considering that there are no barriers to joining the party and women are actively encouraged to join. So within the Labour party 26 per cent of the candidates are selected from 4 per cent of its membership. This means that an individual woman who is a member of the Labour party is more than six times more likely to be selected than an individual man who is a member of the Labour party. To get a 50:50 balance there would have to be a relative bias in favour of women of 12 to one.
When it comes to getting candidates elected, the Labour party again does reasonably well: 22 per cent of its elected TDs out of 26 per cent of its candidates. This is strong evidence that men in the Labour party are stepping aside in considerable numbers in order to promote gender balance. It also raises questions as to what is so repulsive to women about the Labour party? Is it policy? Is it personalities? If the 4 per cent figure is anything near correct then it puts women in the Labour party in numbers comparable with Black and Asian members of the BNP. What has the Labour party done to women to deserve this?
I have no doubt that women are every bit as capable of being public representatives, Senators, TDs, Ministers, and Presidents as men but the evidence suggests that the problem of the low absolute numbers of women in power is at the voluntary participation level of politics. What evidence is there that The Electoral Bill will correct this? – Yours, etc,