30% of political candidates must be female....

iptba

Can I just point out again it's a 40% quota.

It's only 30% for the first few years.

The Corinthian

Is the legislation gender neutral? Or have they drawn up the usual pig's ear whereby if the tables turn, and 80% of candidates selected in ten or twenty years time are women, it won't work both ways?

28064212

The Corinthian wrote: »

Is the legislation gender neutral? Or have they drawn up the usual pig's ear whereby if the tables turn, and 80% of candidates selected in ten or twenty years time are women, it won't work both ways?

Gender neutral:

Payments calculated in accordance with this Part shall be reduced by 50 per cent, unless at 30 least 30 per cent of the candidates whose candidatures were authenticated by the qualified party at the preceding general election were women and at least 30 per cent were men.

Source: http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/bills/2011/7911/b79b11d.pdf

iptba

The Corinthian wrote: »

Is the legislation gender neutral? Or have they drawn up the usual pig's ear whereby if the tables turn, and 80% of candidates selected in ten or twenty years time are women, it won't work both ways?

It's gender neutral:
http://www.environ.ie/en/LocalGovernment/Voting/News/MainBody,29019,en.htm

I'm not sure the quotas/targets for State boards (set up in the 1990s) are, but not 100% sure on that. I remember when Labour were last in power in the 1990s, they were very in to those quotas/targets e.g. the head of UCG/NUIG student union wasn't let sit on the college board for a lot/most of his term because the board of the college had too many men, according to the quota.

The Corinthian

Well, at least it's not for actual Dail seats (yet). Too much danger there of ending up with a hung parliament.

maggy_thatcher

The Corinthian wrote: »

Well, at least it's not for actual Dail seats (yet). Too much danger there of ending up with a hung parliament.

That would require a constitutional amendment, and hopefully the public wouldn't be crazy enough to agree to that.

iptba

iptba wrote: »

I'm not sure the quotas/targets for State boards (set up in the 1990s) are, but not 100% sure on that. I remember when Labour were last in power in the 1990s, they were very in to those quotas/targets e.g. the head of UCG/NUIG student union wasn't let sit on the college board for a lot/most of his term because the board of the college had too many men, according to the quota.

That, of course, wasn't good in terms of having students represented on the college board. In that case, there might have been none (I think so, as I think I recall the point being made, but again not 100% sure) while I believe it wasn't the case that there were no women on the college board before the union president was removed
[i.e. in case anyone is missing the point, I'm contrasting the relative importance placed on one sort of representation (students on a college board) with another sort of representation (the percentage of women on the college board)].

iptba

maggy_thatcher wrote: »

That would require a constitutional amendment, and hopefully the public wouldn't be crazy enough to agree to that.

I don't think this "less radical" quota had majority support e.g. from one (or two) polls I saw - but I don't think any polls I saw were proper polls.

The Corinthian

maggy_thatcher wrote: »

That would require a constitutional amendment, and hopefully the public wouldn't be crazy enough to agree to that.

Actually, I was joking...

py2006

If a lot of women have no interest in entering politics how are they going to fulfill these quotas. I can only assume this quota will rise to 50% eventually.

Will it have a positive effect in that more women will take an interest in politics knowing there is a good opportunity now for them to get in the door.

The_Conductor

py2006 wrote: »

I can only assume this quota will rise to 50% eventually.

I think the proposal is that it be raised to 40%- and its only to do with party funding. Aka- a group of independents could still get together in a grouping to try to access funding- if they had the requisite number of female members.

Personally I'm very against quotas- as you do not get the best person for the post- you get the candidate who is most politically correct (in this instance, female).

This issue here is a lack of women electing to run for election- if you compare the number of women running- against their representation in the Dail- you actually have proportionally a significantly higher success rate for women candidates, than for men.

How do you level the playing field, so there is no perceived obstructions to running for election in the first instance? Universal childcare (a la the Swedish model)? Other incentives/inducements to get women to run (in general) and as a side effect, to enter the workforce- where there might be a reticence to at present? Reform of the social welfare system? Abolition of children's benefit- to be replaced with universal childcare and meals in schools? Inducements for people to take up gainful employment- irrespective of what the job might be?

At the moment- the system is stacked against significant numbers of women entering the workforce, fullstop- if women can't be made get over the psychological and financial blocks associated with entering the workforce- how the hell will they all of a sudden magically want to run for the Seanad or the Dail?

To be honest- the lack of female candidates- is a reflection of how we have skewed Irish society with perverse incentives to not get involved- than it is a reflection of men somehow clubbing together (women are a hell of a lot better at clubbing together and fighting their gender corners/agendas- tbh- even in the Dail).

The Corinthian

smccarrick wrote: »

How do you level the playing field, so there is no perceived obstructions to running for election in the first instance? Universal childcare (a la the Swedish model)? Other incentives/inducements to get women to run (in general) and as a side effect, to enter the workforce- where there might be a reticence to at present? Reform of the social welfare system? Abolition of children's benefit- to be replaced with universal childcare and meals in schools? Inducements for people to take up gainful employment- irrespective of what the job might be?

Is there a reason you didn't suggest that we change attitudes and law in society so that men can more easily adopt traditional female roles, just as women have for male roles? More men taking over child care would appear to be the most logical way of levelling out the playing field, so I'm not sure why it doesn't even get a mention.

The_Conductor

The Corinthian wrote: »

Is there a reason you didn't suggest that we change attitudes and law in society so that men can more easily adopt traditional female roles, just as women have for male roles? More men taking over child care would appear to be the most logical way of levelling out the playing field, so I'm not sure why it doesn't even get a mention.

It is increasingly happening though- the vast majority of those made unemployed since 2007 have been male (there is only one quarter in the last 5 years where more women than men were made unemployed).

Yes- societal attitudes need to change- no-one can argue with that- but I would qualify this with suggesting that some of these changes are happening already, in the background, with little or no fanfare. Women are great at blowing their own horns, us men, on the other hand, are not.

The Corinthian

smccarrick wrote: »

Yes- societal attitudes need to change- no-one can argue with that- but I would qualify this with suggesting that some of these changes are happening already, in the background, with little or no fanfare. Women are great at blowing their own horns, us men, on the other hand, are not.

I didn't simply say societal attitudes, I also included law. And these changes are actually not really happening or if they are they are happening at a glacier speed. Sure, during a recession more men may end up at home, while their partner or wife is out working, but this is a stopgap and will reverse the moment that the recession abates.

One could equally argue that women's increased involvement in politics is also "happening already, in the background, with little or no fanfare." Yet apparently in this case it's not happening fast enough, ergo interventionist schemes such as quotas.

But what is interesting is that the root cause (women being blocked from politics as they're seen as the child carers of society) is actually completely ignored. None of the suggestions you made sought to even redress the gender imbalance there, even as a long-term goal, despite it being the actual reason why women are so unrepresented.

Where does this reluctance to even consider dealing with the root problem stem from?

The_Conductor

When you say there is a failure to deal with the root causes- what do you identify as the root causes, and how would you deal with them?

A gender quota is dealing with a symptom- not a cause- and as such is doomed to failure, regardless of whether it as a measure is deemed a success or not. Quota systems all over the world are being revisited at the moment- notably the quotas for black/mixed race in various US universities.

What are the root causes in your eyes (and I don't mean a simple- they are the child bearers)- and how would you propose to deal with them?

The Corinthian

smccarrick wrote: »

What are the root causes in your eyes (and I don't mean a simple- they are the child bearers)- and how would you propose to deal with them?

Actually it does come down to the role of women being child carers, or more correctly women having a choice between the traditionally female 'carer' role and the male 'provider' role.

If you give any group such a choice, they're naturally going to prioritize one of them. If that means prioritizing the carer role, the provider role may still be chosen, but ultimately in a secondary capacity. Thus hours in the office (or campaign trail) will be sacrificed, as will the types of jobs, as will other commitments to those jobs.

It's actually simple mathematics when you come down to it; if choice is very limited or non-existent for men, then 99.9% will end up taking the traditional provider role and prioritize it. If women have greater choice, then there will be a more pronounced split, and as those who don't prioritize career tend not to get ahead in their career as much as those who do, you get your various pay and political gaps on an aggregate level.

Men presently do not have such a choice. Legally we don't; family law is completely biased against us and social attitudes are such that were we to try to adopt the carer role we would be vilified as 'losers' or worse. The recession may have made it more acceptable, but only temporarily - those men who are presently carers are only so because they cannot find a job, if they could, those attitudes would come back with a vengeance.

Naturally the best way to even out the playing field is to both make it easier to be both a carer and provider, but by far the best way would be to give men a similar choice with respect to both roles. If this happens and men increasingly choose the carer role, they too will find themselves prioritizing it over work and things such as the gender pay and political gaps will narrow accordingly.

An obvious way of doing this is to change those laws and legal presumptions (i.e. biases) that presently enshrine this lack of choice. The presumption that the mother will have primary custody, lack of parental rights for fathers, the presumption in divorce and separation that the former spouse is essentially owed a living by the other spouse - as long as she's a woman, the constitutional article that gives only women the right to be homemakers, and so on. Without changing these, you're unlikely to change anyone's attitudes.

But you also need to change those attitudes; both men's and women's. We need to promote the choice (and image) of carer for men and attack negative stereotypes associated with stay-at-home men.

Both the legal and social changes need to be done in tandem, otherwise you'll get nowhere. Introducing paternity leave is not going to encourage many men to take it up when society still judges them on how much they earn for the family and they have (if unmarried) the same rights to their children as a hired babysitter. Neither will the idea that a man is not necessarily the provider going to get traction while divorce courts continue to rule 99% of the time that he is.

If you don't approach the root problem, all you've left is the 'cake and eat it' solution - whereby women still have the choice to be a carer and provider, and men remain as only providers, but positive discrimination is also employed so that women can better do both. And that is neither equitable, nor sustainable in the long term.

charlemont

Gender has never come into it whenever I'v cast a vote. Its not a good rule at all.

iptba

The Corinthian wrote: »

An obvious way of doing this is to change those laws and legal presumptions (i.e. biases) that presently enshrine this lack of choice. The presumption that the mother will have primary custody, lack of parental rights for fathers, the presumption in divorce and separation that the former spouse is essentially owed a living by the other spouse - as long as she's a woman, the constitutional article that gives only women the right to be homemakers, and so on. Without changing these, you're unlikely to change anyone's attitudes.

Possibly a good time to bring this up, given the constitution is being looked at (constitutional convention, etc.)

The Corinthian

iptba wrote: »

Possibly a good time to bring this up, given the constitution is being looked at (constitutional convention, etc.)

I think you're being a tad naive.

If you want influence on policy you need leverage. That leverage may be that you have a full time lobbyist in your corner; these are essentially union, business association or 'equality' (i.e. Feminist) groups who's full time job is to network with the political establishment and who can create good or bad publicity for the politicians in questions, through a combination of media and other connections. Or that you can exert pressure through the political party machine of the politicians involved.

Otherwise they have nothing to either gain from including any such suggestions or lose from ignoring them. What are we going to do? Write a letter to the Irish Times?

So this is how it will play out; the final report will include some mention of such emails/letters on the lines of "a number of submissions suggested/argued for... however, it was felt by the committee that..." and thus your views will be acknowledged and then dismissed.

You may, if you're very lucky, get an aspiration to do something. This means that they empathize with your views, agree something should be done, but ultimately nothing will be. It may even be sold as something that promotes the rights of fathers, until you read it and realize it does nothing of the sort, or even acts against those rights (as per the guardianship reform paper).

Why? Firstly because much of what I discussed above would involve a fairly radical change in policy from what they're planning to implement. Secondly, there will be groups who may even oppose such moves; for example, can you see Feminist groups supporting moves to water down mothers' rights in favour of fathers? Also Shatter and Bacik (who are involved in this process) have both been less than friendly to men's or father's rights in the past and are hardly going to have a massive change of ideological heart. Finally, it's just too much hassle to rewrite the documents in question.

So feel free to 'bring it up' if you like and let me know how you get on. I promise to tell you I told you so.

iptba

The Corinthian wrote: »

I think you're being a tad naive.

If you want influence on policy you need leverage. That leverage may be that you have a full time lobbyist in your corner; these are essentially union, business association or 'equality' (i.e. Feminist) groups who's full time job is to network with the political establishment and who can create good or bad publicity for the politicians in questions, through a combination of media and other connections. Or that you can exert pressure through the political party machine of the politicians involved.

Otherwise they have nothing to either gain from including any such suggestions or lose from ignoring them. What are we going to do? Write a letter to the Irish Times?

So this is how it will play out; the final report will include some mention of such emails/letters on the lines of "a number of submissions suggested/argued for... however, it was felt by the committee that..." and thus your views will be acknowledged and then dismissed.

You may, if you're very lucky, get an aspiration to do something. This means that they empathize with your views, agree something should be done, but ultimately nothing will be. It may even be sold as something that promotes the rights of fathers, until you read it and realize it does nothing of the sort, or even acts against those rights (as per the guardianship reform paper).

Why? Firstly because much of what I discussed above would involve a fairly radical change in policy from what they're planning to implement. Secondly, there will be groups who may even oppose such moves; for example, can you see Feminist groups supporting moves to water down mothers' rights in favour of fathers? Also Shatter and Bacik (who are involved in this process) have both been less than friendly to men's or father's rights in the past and are hardly going to have a massive change of ideological heart. Finally, it's just too much hassle to rewrite the documents in question.

So feel free to 'bring it up' if you like and let me know how you get on. I promise to tell you I told you so.

You make some interesting points in general about influencing policy.

However, with regard to:

the constitutional article that gives only women the right to be homemakers

I have heard many feminists complain about it over the years.

The_Conductor

iptba wrote: »

You make some interesting points in general about influencing policy.

However, with regard to:

The Corinthian wrote:

the constitutional article that gives only women the right to be homemakers

I have heard many feminists complain about it over the years.

Surely such a constitutional provision is a breach of EU equality law, and subject to challenge at an EU level?

The Corinthian

iptba wrote: »

You make some interesting points in general about influencing policy.

Very good; that's more or less how any such emails will be dismissed, starting with "you make some interesting points in general about..." I see you've gotten into the spirit of things.

I have heard many feminists complain about it over the years.

It's an interesting area. On one level to oppose it would technically involve acting against the interests of women, but at the same time it perpetuates the "woman's place is in the home" message. That's why you'll hear feminists complain about it over the years, but not much effort where it comes to getting rid of it.

I expect it will eventually be eliminated, as it serves little purpose. A woman's position in the home is already de facto protected by law, without needing a constitutional article to de jure state it.

smccarrick wrote: »

Surely such a constitutional provision is a breach of EU equality law, and subject to challenge at an EU level?

Then challenge it. There's plenty of laws and articles that would be in breach of EU equality law, and subject to challenge at an EU level, in Ireland. But very little effort to actually challenge them and very little support for those who might.

iptba

The Corinthian wrote: »

Very good; that's more or less how any such emails will be dismissed, starting with "you make some interesting points in general about..." I see you've gotten into the spirit of things.

And I see you've become cynical. What other wording would you have suggested for somebody who thought your analysis was interesting, but still disagreed with you that there was no chance that provision in the Constitution would be changed.

The Corinthian

iptba wrote: »

And I see you've become cynical. What other wording would you have suggested for somebody who thought your analysis was interesting, but still disagreed with you that there was no chance that provision in the Constitution would be changed.

The wording is fine, I'm just poking fun at you.

As to your disagreeing with my cynical analysis, you're free to do so. As I said, let's see what happens and how you get on and we'll see if my cynicism is unfounded.

iptba

The Corinthian wrote: »

The wording is fine, I'm just poking fun at you.

As to your disagreeing with my cynical analysis, you're free to do so. As I said, let's see what happens and how you get on and we'll see if my cynicism is unfounded.

I threw this out as something that could be changed when you mentioned it. Not a priority at the moment. However, I'm making some connections in the MRM world at the moment - maybe something will happen in general about getting organised eventually.

iptba

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0807/1224321632540.html

Gender quotas for candidates

Sir, – In the run-up to the Dáil summer recess, the gender quotas Bill passed both houses of the Oireachtas with little fanfare, in the guise of a bill on the public funding of political parties (Home News, July 20th). The fact that a law of such importance to the functioning of our electoral system and of questionable constitutionality passed with little proper debate in the Dáil, or in the public arena more generally is very worrying.

With passage of this Bill, sexual discrimination by the State shall be enshrined as the law of the land. Political parties that fail to select more than 30 per cent female candidates will have their public funding halved. In the last general election, 15 per cent of candidates were female, and precisely the same percentage of elected TDs were female.

Political parties selected between 15 per cent and 26 per cent female candidates, while only 9 per cent of Independents were female. This indicates that the electorate is not influenced by gender when choosing a candidate to vote for, and it appears that political parties already select female candidates at a higher rate than the rate at which they stand as Independents. Whatever the reason for the low level of participation of women in politics, discrimination on behalf of the electorate or political parties is not supported by an objective reading of the statistics.

Imposing quotas to achieve an arbitrary desired result is unjust, almost certainly unconstitutional and is demeaning to women, by suggesting that the only way that women can succeed in politics is by receiving preferential treatment.

While the gender quotas issue is important, the public funding of political parties is an issue that has received even less scrutiny and has the potential to be much more corrupting of our political system.

The legislation entails funding political parties from the public purse based on results from the previous election. This amounts to a State subsidy for incumbents and is clearly discriminatory against new political parties, Independent candidates and existing parties without current Dáil representation.

The precedent set by the McKenna judgment is that the State cannot preferentially fund one side of a referendum campaign, and it would seem obvious that this proposed system of campaign funding is similarly vulnerable to constitutional challenge. Corporate financing has correctly been identified as a potential corrupting influence on politics, but replacing it with a system of State funding that subsidises some candidates and not others, and can withhold funding from some candidates if they are the wrong gender, is not an improvement.

A simpler alternative, along the lines of the McCain-Feingold act in the US, is to ban corporate donations, put upper limits on individual contributions, and insist that all donations are made public. This Government was elected with many promises for governmental and constitutional reforms, but their actions on issues such as Oireachtas inquiries, Seanad reform, campaign financing and constitutional reform have been ill-considered and have been given insufficient public scrutiny. Bad reforms are not better than no reform at all. – Yours, etc,

Just a reminder to everyone that it's really a 40% quota. It's only 30% for the first few years. I'm not sure even the letter writer new this.

JimmyCrackCorn

They cant be much more useless anyway. Why not let people in to parties because of their sex.

Id rather see the parties have 30pc of people from the business community. Far too many teachers, solicitors and barristers.

The amount of time Ireland looses out due to not being able to negotiate or run civil service departments is beyond a joke.

iptba

JimmyCrackCorn wrote: »

They cant be much more useless anyway. Why not let people in to parties because of their sex.

Id rather see the parties have 30pc of people from the business community. Far too many teachers, solicitors and barristers.

The amount of time Ireland looses out due to not being able to negotiate or run civil service departments is beyond a joke.

There is no sign that quotas based on professions are likely to happen. And having one quota makes it more difficult to have other ones.

iptba

Was listening to the Sean Moncrieff show earlier today. A female TD from Waterford was given an easy ride saying it was hard for women in the Oireachtas etc and that's why she thinks we needed the recently proposed 25%* (sic) gender quotas for candidates!

*It's 30% for the first few years, then 40% from then on.

Pawwed Rig

JimmyCrackCorn wrote: »

They cant be much more useless anyway. Why not let people in to parties because of their sex.

Id rather see the parties have 30pc of people from the business community. Far too many teachers, solicitors and barristers.

The amount of time Ireland looses out due to not being able to negotiate or run civil service departments is beyond a joke.

Surely that is the purpose of the Senate which the govt are so eager to dispose of.