Joyce Fegan: Facts show gender quotas benefit us all long-term

When Sweden introduced a gender quota for elections in 1994, the competence of their politicians in general increased, and among men in particular. Quotas are there to speed up the essential change we’re just too prejudiced, institutionalised and self-serving to make.

Is the issue with gender quotas or is the issue with women?

This week Fine Gael TD Emer Higgins introduced a Private Members’ Bill to Dáil Éireann seeking gender quotas for company boards.

The bill includes a 33% quota for women on boards, rising to 40% after three years, and introduces possible sanctions for companies that fail to comply with the gender quota.

Many people have strong opinions on quotas, gender quotas in particular. The opinions are always predictable, almost interchangeable and mostly parroted.

Those opinions go something like this:

• “I’m all for women but I believe in meritocracy, people should be in positions based on merit not gender”.
• “I’m all for women but I got where I am because I have the skills, education and experience, not because I am male or female”.
• “I’m all for women but I don’t believe in tokenism — an under-qualified woman may get the role over a more qualified man”.

You will hear as many women, as men, rehashing these opinions.

If you’re someone who’s worried about meritocracy for example, or the idea that an under-qualified man might lose out to a token woman, there was some research done on that.

The research was carried out by the London School of Economics, and based in Sweden where a gender quota for elections was brought in, nearly 30 years ago.

There was “strong evidence of cosy arrangements prior to the quota, with mediocre leaders selecting mediocre followers”.

So when we opine against gender quotas is it because we actually want to protect cosy mediocracy, not meritocracy?

For those still worried about meritocracy being unfairly affected by gender quotas and not convinced by the above finding, because bias in fairness does take time to dissolve, the research went further.

When Sweden introduced a gender quota for elections in 1994, the competence of their politicians in general increased, and among men in particular. It also found that quotas were bad news for mediocre male leaders, who tended not to be re-elected.

The qualified person, male, female, or other doesn’t lose out — once they’re at the table or on the levelled-playing field.

See that’s what this is actually about, not tokenism, not protecting meritocracy — gender quotas are about levelling historically and heavily uneven playing fields.

If we return to women in the workplace and go back a few years let’s see how level it was.

In 1970, women on average earned 55% of the hourly rate of men. And when the activists and the progressive politicians of the day called for pay parity (something we still don’t have as the gender pay gap sits at about 14%) there were loud opinions shouting them down with convincing-sounding concerns.

“The company will go bust and we’ll all be out of work, if we increase women’s wages”, was the argument of the day. It turns out, Ireland is in a far better financial position today than it was in 1970. Companies grew and more companies began.

Bringing the calendar back to 1966 and we see that less than 1% of women were in “higher professional” job categories, this was at a time when a third of our workforce was made up of women.

Were Irish women of the 1960s less competent than their male counterparts, and were Irish women of 1970 less productive and therefore less remunerated or, did the biases of the day and the deep-seated old social structures create a vastly unbalanced playing field?

A small note on the workforce of 1966 and how 33% of it was actually female — 81% of those women were child free. There was no place for motherhood in the workplace.

So what if we had left well enough alone and went along with the opinion of the day that paying women more or employing more women would be bad for business?

What if the marriage bar, meaning women had to retire from working in the civil service, had never been lifted in 1973? Where would our society and economy be at?

A total of 99% of our doctors, accountants, architects, pharmacists and lawyers would be male. All women would earn 55% less than men. And if you wanted to draft legislation, create public policy or be the next secretary general of the Department of Health or Finance or Foreign Affairs, you’d better not fall in love, lest you end up married.

We would have even less women in the workforce, because if they became a mother, their paltry wage wouldn’t even come close to covering the childcare fees of 2021 and so they’d retire from employment upon cutting the umbilical cord. 

Women in abusive relationships would face even more difficulty trying to extricate themselves — imagine trying to find housing on half your current wage, and remember that you have a working class job, because 99% of professional roles are held by men.

Women would be so busy trying to make ends meet and do childcare that boards and cabinets would be as likely to feature on their to-do or can-do list as building their own private spacecraft to the moon.

If the activists and progressive politicians of the day had not activated for legal change and quotas, this is where we would be.

Quotas are there to speed up the essential change we’re just too prejudiced, institutionalised and self-serving to make.

The Global Gender Gap Report for 2021 reckons that based on the current rate of progress, it will be 2121 before we achieve gender equality.

And in Ireland where we have a gender quota for our general elections (30% of candidates fielded by a party must be female) it will still take until 2063 (again at the current rate of progress) to achieve parity between male and female representation in the Dáil. That’s according to the recent Citizens’ Assembly on gender equality.

We still don’t have gender quotas for local elections, and our elected councillors usually go to run for the Dáil and most of our TDs started out in politics on councils.

You’ll hear some politicians say they just can’t find good female candidates to run. Well maybe if you looked beyond the senior men’s GAA team to school gates, baby groups, Tidy Town groups, local social justice organisations, and women-led businesses in your area you might just find some “good female candidates”.

The idea is that we bring in a quota to level out a playing field, snap us out of our biases, set us targets, the field gets levelled, we get a workplace and a government that looks like the society it serves and represents and then the quota is laid to rest. Quotas are meant to be temporary measures.

If you are against gender quotas are you just against change? The facts have shown that gender quotas advance women, yes, but long-term they benefit us all.