New dimension of social diversity: minority women in the 35th Parliament.

• Author: Black, Jerome H.

Jerome H. Black is Associate Professor of political science at McGill University.

The election of 53 women in the 1993 general election provided further opportunities for reflection on the significance of gender in elite-level politics. One important perspective, given added significance by the record level of women elected, carries on the tradition of assessing the impact of women in the House, particularly their possible influence in relation to policy matters that are of central concern to many women in Canadian society. Representation is another area for reflection and particularly the fact that women still remain considerably under-represented relative to their population incidence. This article explores an additional, and as yet largely unresearched, dimension associated with elected women, their ethnoracial diversity. Using systematic methods of categorization, it documents the number of minority women in the 35th Parliament. Their election in 1993 in significant and unprecedented numbers is an important justification for such a focus, as is the fact that without explicit attention to their double minority status, as both women and ethnoracial minorities, an understanding of their experiences as candidates and MPs is likely to be incomplete.

A variety of interesting queries suggest themselves as relevant points of departure in looking at minority women. For example, are the hurdles on route to Parliament higher or different for minority women than they are for women and minorities taken separately? Similarly, once inside Parliament, are they confronted with a particular set of constraints linked to their background? Does their approach to parliamentary politics reflect their special background? Is preference given, if at all, to preoccupations reflecting their distinctiveness as women, as minorities, or both?

Adding meaningfulness to the value of answering these and other questions about the implications of double minority status is the fact that a notable number of women with minority group origins were indeed elected in 1993. Even the most casual inspection provides some sense that something new occurred that year. The unprecedented election of not one but two women of colour, Jean Augustine and Hedy Fry, immediately comes to mind. Other newly elected women as well, particularly Eleni Bakopanos, Maria Minna and Anna Terrana, can be fairly easily identified as having roots in their (Greek and Italian) ethnic communities. Nevertheless, the attention paid to the election of minority women MPs has been largely informal and anecdotal, so that the true dimensions of their presence remain to be documented. Certainly, there has yet to be any rigorous gauging of how the 35th Parliament compares with earlier ones in terms of social diversity.

The Problem of Categorization

Because ethnoracial origin is a multidimensional phenomenon, and not always easily measured, determining the ancestral backgrounds of parliamentarians is not a simple matter. The impediments have been carefully set out in a recent paper which classified all 295 MPs elected in 1993 along origin lines, (1) but which did not address gender distinctions. A brief summary of the methodological issues dealt with in that essay can serve as an instructive prelude to the categorization results broken down by both origin and gender.

The classification effort in the existing paper on the 35th Parliament was purposefully narrow to emphasize the dimension of objective condition, rather than subjective sentiment. That is, the analysis was directed at determining categorical membership in ethnoracial groups and not at evaluating the nature and extent of felt or expressed attachment to the heritage group. In focusing on minority status as a background characteristic, it was understood that no assumption could be made about particular subjectively based patterns of identity. This would mean in the present context, for instance, that not all women classified as having a minority background necessarily regard their heritage as a significant factor in their personal careers; fewer yet would regard it as salient for their public lives. It was also understood that highlighting the objective dimension did not imply that the study of the subjective side of ethnicity and race is unimportant. Quite the contrary, differences in the kind and degree of expressed ethnoracial identity would, in fact, constitute critical factors for many analytical purposes, such as consideration of the antecedents in support of policies of concern to multicultural communities.

A categorization approach is no less valuable, however. In fact, it is a necessary starting point for incorporation of the subjective dimension, since expressed attachment can only be gauged relative to the category of potential attachment. Moreover, by itself, an objective approach is necessary for allowing judgements about the important issue of the incidence of minority individuals in...