Women in Canadian Politics - Encouraging Women's Participation

Encouraging Women's Participation

Political parties at both the federal and provincial levels have often faced difficulty in boosting the number of women prepared to stand as election candidates. This may be in part because women may be reluctant to run for parliament because of the adversity and combative nature of work.

Political parties which take a strictly hands-off approach typically find themselves unable to put forward a slate of candidates that is more than 20 to 25 per cent female – but parties which implement more active strategies often risk being criticized as "anti-democratic" if their programs too closely resemble affirmative action. For example, the British Columbia New Democratic Party has used a strategy in which a riding association whose incumbent MLA retires must nominate a woman in the resulting by-election or general election, in order to ensure that the party is placing women in "winnable" seats – however, this strategy has faced criticism from some potential candidates who have felt that the policy constituted reverse discrimination against them as men.

Conversely, the federal New Democratic Party requires its riding associations to make at least a good faith attempt to find a viable woman or minority candidate whenever a nomination contest is held, but does not set a quota per se.

At various times, both federal and provincial parties have also been accused of tokenism, slotting a disproportionate number of women candidates in ridings their party has little chance of winning while doing little or nothing about the fact that the more competitive candidate selection process in "winnable" seats still tends to favor men.

In addition to the underrepresentation of women in politics overall, younger women are typically even more underrepresented. While younger men are quite regularly elected to political office at all levels of government, women under the age of 40 holding office at the provincial or federal levels are especially rare. This dichotomy has been attributed to a variety of factors, including women being reluctant to take on the responsibilities of a career in politics until their children are older, as well as the belief that younger women are especially likely to face sexist assumptions that their political and professional abilities are unequal to those of men in the same age bracket.

The non-partisan organization Equal Voice, whose board consists of several prominent female politicians, works to assist women in running for public office through education, advocacy and professional networking. When former federal MP Belinda Stronach was given an award by Equal Voice for her role in advancing women's participation in politics, in her speech she identified some of what she saw as the barriers, including a lack of civility in the House of Commons, an excessive focus on women parliamentarians' appearance rather than their ideas and skills, and the need to take advantage of modern communications technologies, such as videoconferencing and Internet voting, so that both men and women in politics have greater flexibility to balance their job duties with their family lives.