Annabel Crabb* says there is a little-known experiment that shows quotas for women’s leadership can change more than just politics.
International Women’s Day once more this year found Australia in one of its periodic rounds of head-scratching about why there aren’t more women in federal politics.
Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, whose Federal Caucus is 40 per cent female, rarely misses an opportunity for a visual reminder of this fact, stepping out with powerful women whenever a camera is within cooee.
Labor’s near-parity representation of women is often mentioned as a given; its leadership figures, Tanya Plibersek and Penny Wong are unshakeable features of the party’s landscape.
But this circumstance didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident.
In September this year, it will be 25 years since the ALP’s Federal Conference came together in Hobart and made the historic pledge that women would be preselected for 35 per cent of winnable seats at all parliamentary elections by 2002.
“Looking back on my time in politics, I’m not sure we understood how profound that change could be,” says Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Mark Butler, who, as a senior party figure in his home State of South Australia, shared responsibility for enforcing the policy in the 1990s and 2000s.
“There were various counter-insurgencies, as people tried to redefine what constituted a winnable seat, and so on, but it just so happened that after the rule was agreed on, we lost government pretty spectacularly in 1996,” he recalls.
“We had a lot of people starting to leave.”
“So we had a whole lot of opportunities to preselect new candidates in not only winnable, but safe seats.”
“That included seats like Sydney when Gerry Hand left, Lawler when Barry Jones left and Gellibrand when Ralph Willis left.”
The three seats Mr Butler mentions went to Tanya Plibersek (Labor’s current deputy leader), Julia Gillard (Australia’s first female PM), and Nicola Roxon, who was a powerful Minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments and became (a historical footnote) the first woman to serve in Cabinet whilst raising a preschool-aged child.
Mr Butler recalls that the process itself — seat by seat — was difficult.
“It was hard, because men are pretty good at fighting for their traditional roles; running everything and winning everything.”
“But then it became easier.”
“We got to a place of critical mass where there’s been so much cultural change in the show that it’s not a struggle.”
“The first 20 per cent was a lot harder than the next 20 per cent.”
Mr Butler won’t venture a view on whether women intrinsically behave differently in politics from men.
“I think it’s idealised a lot in the public debate, as if before this change the Party was populated by caveman brutes and now it’s idyllic; neither is true,” he says.
“But there are shades of grey.”
“There’s no question that debate is conducted in a different way.”
“And there is more attention paid to different policy areas; like the way in the last period of government we moved child care and paid maternity leave to the front of the queue.”
It’s hard to lab test quotas
The problem with quotas — apart from their unpleasantly anti-democratic vibe, which makes them a big ask for libertarian parties — is that when they are imposed, they’re imposed on real-life organisations and structures.
So you can’t really lab test them and gain a perfect answer as to what would have happened without them.
Or whether the women who gained office with a quota in place would have been appointed “on merit” anyway.
This is an uncertainty of which the institutional opponents of gender quotas make regular and loud use (although, oddly, the existing quotas, like geographical and factional quotas in the selection of the Cabinet, don’t ever seem to provoke similar concerns).
A pretty clear pattern seems to be available from the Labor experiment, but we’ll never know for sure whether Ms Gillard would have become Prime Minister anyway, or whether we’d still have a paid parental leave scheme.
India provides a randomised experiment
But there is one fascinating international example which lends itself well to a more scientific analysis.
The Harvard behavioural economist Iris Bohnet wrote in her recent book What Works about India’s Panchayati Raj Act, which in 1993 decreed that one-third of Local Council seats would henceforth be reserved for women.
Moreover, the legislation directed, one-third of village leaders in any given district had to be female.
The legislation attracted all the complaints of tokenism that you’d expect, and dire warnings that powerful men would simply have their wives and sisters installed as puppets.
But by 2005, the proportion of Local Government seats occupied by women had risen from 5 per cent to 40 per cent — well beyond the legislated target.
And the fascinating part of the experiment was this: the villages whose turn it was — each election — to have a female chief were chosen at random.
Out of a hat!
So researchers were handed their dream of a randomised trial; a collection of very similar villages, some of which were handed female leaders, and some of which were not.
Social scientists from MIT and the Kennedy School flocked to the spot.
The quota rule changed more than politics
They found that the female chiefs invested more in public services, such as roads and drinking water.
They increased the frequency of women speaking up in public meetings, and the reporting of crimes (including rape).
They were less likely to take bribes than their male counterparts.
But the indirect effects of the quota rule went far beyond politics.
Professor Bohnet writes: “After having experienced a female chief twice, parents were more likely to want their daughters to study past secondary school, basically eliminating the gender gap in aspirations.”
The visibility of female leaders, in other words, changed the lives of individuals outside the system to which the quota applied.
When the debate about women’s representation turns into seat-by-seat guerrilla warfare, nothing changes in politics.
And the change forgone isn’t just restricted to the political sphere.
Carried in the pockets of every woman who doesn’t make it into Parliament are the girls of the future who never get the opportunity to look up and see her there.
* Annabel Crabb is the ABC’s Chief Political Writer and a presenter for ABC TV . She tweets at @annabelcrabb.
This article first appeared at www.abc.net.au.
