Women's representation in the house of commons: a stalemate?

• Author: Bashevkin, Sylvia
• Position: Report

This article looks at female representation in the House of Commons. It shows that in terms of numbers, a plateau seems to have been reached over the last two decades. The paper also argues that even if demand for female candidates were to increase significantly, this factor on its own would not redress the limited supply phenomenon that originates from other sources--including stereotypic treatments of women in public life.

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Since the creation in 2001 of Equal Voice, a group dedicated to increasing the numbers of women who hold public office at all levels in Canada, the issue of gender differences in political involvement has been raised with some frequency. Media stories have celebrated progress and, occasionally, what are presented as breakthroughs in female engagement. One recent example followed the fall 2010 municipal elections in Toronto, when 15 women won seats on the 45-member city council. A prominent story in Canada's largest circulation daily explained the reason for "cheering" as follows: one-third of the new council would be female. (1) The story neglected to mention that multiple borough councils in pre-amalgamation Toronto, alongside the former Metro Council, had attained roughly the same levels or higher, with Etobicoke's borough council reaching 42% women members in 1996--or nearly 15 years earlier. (2)

Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, philosopher George Santayana argued compellingly that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." With respect to women in Canadian federal politics, it is worth stepping back from contemporary representational circumstances to ask how they compare with those of the recent as well as more distant past. My assessment opens with evidence that proportions of elected women MPs have been stalemated in the roughly one-fifth range for nearly 20 years. This plateau exists despite expectations that women's growing educational and professional attainment, the willingness of two major federal parties to adopt specific rule changes designed to increase numbers of female parliamentarians, and concerted action on the part of groups such as Equal Voice, would ensure this figure rose toward parity.

Using Rosabeth Moss Kanter's typology presented in her 1977 volume titled Men and Women of the Corporation, the article argues that the composition of the Canadian House of Commons has only shifted from a uniformly male group in the years before 1921 toward a skewed group in the subsequent ninety years. (3) Following from Drude Dahlerup's work on the likely consequences of skewed representation in elective bodies, I discuss how measurable biases in the treatment of female politicians continue. (4)

It is helpful to begin with a brief review of quantitative patterns of female engagement at the federal level, using official election results as a guide. Canadian women became eligible to hold seats in the House of Commons as of 7 July 1919 and, within two and half years, the first woman MP (Agnes Macphail from the rural Ontario constituency of South-East Grey) was elected. Macphail ran as a candidate for the United Farmers of Ontario, a formation which eventually became part of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner to the New Democratic party.

Macphail's early biographers describe her initial entrance to parliament as follows: "She thought of the women who would surely walk this corridor too. 'I could almost hear them coming,' she said later. Her ear must have been tuned to a still remote time, for in the next quarter century only four other Canadian women were elected to the federal House of Commons." (5) In the roughly sixty years following Macphail's arrival in Ottawa, about 100 other women in total won provincial or federal seats in Canada.

If we fast forward to the mid-1960s era that saw the beginnings of second-wave feminist activism in Canada, we find this same period corresponded with the presence of two women MPs in the House of Commons. One was a New Democrat, Grace MacInnis, the daughter of former CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth, whose role model in her youth--not surprisingly--was Agnes Macphail. (6) The second was Judy LaMarsh, federal Secretary of State and a member of the governing Liberal caucus.

In the jargon of contemporary gender and politics research, LaMarsh is best described as a "critical actor." (7) In 1967 she played a pivotal role in pressing Prime Minister Lester Pearson to appoint a federal royal commission on the status of women. LaMarsh's case illustrates the extent to which it may be misleading to assume the presence of fewer than 10% women MPs before the mid-1980s translated into the absence of pro-equality influences on public policy. In fact, her legislative career points toward the importance of studying the other side of the question concerning the conversion from numbers of women MPs to substantive, pro-feminist policy influence. In particular, LaMarsh's contributions suggest it is worth asking whether over time, the growth in numbers of elected women produced a commensurate increase in the willingness of MPs to follow in her footsteps as "critical actors." While the research literature...