Madam, – Barry Walsh (November 7th) takes Senator Ivana Bacik to task for omitting to point out in her report for the Oireachtas justice committee that there were sufficient women candidates running in the 2007 election to elect 81 women to the Dáil.
That this did not happen was the choice of the electorate who, it seems, is unwilling to vote for them. Mr Walsh suggests the committee should explore the reason why this should be so, rather than waste time on politically correct window-dressing. In these straitened times it is important not to waste scarce resources on needless investigations. Hence we write to inform readers that sufficient research has already been done to indicate that Mr Walsh’s conclusions are naive.
Of course the electorate could have elected a Dáil with near gender equality, but to do so would have forced the voter to elevate gender above all other possible bases for vote choice. We present evidence in a forthcoming paper (available from the Irish election study website: www.tcd.ie/ines) to show that the electorate as a whole prefers neither male nor female candidates. We examine a rich variety of ways in which a gender bias might be shown, and are unable to discover any systematic manifestation of such bias.
Data from the Irish election study also shows more than 60 per cent of voters of all parties would like to see more women in politics. The fundamental problem is not why the electorate does not support women candidates, but, as Senator Bacik has reported, why so few women either seek or achieve a party nomination. – Yours, etc,
GAIL McELROY & MICHAEL MARSH,
Department of Political Science,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.