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Breaking Male Dominance in Politics

Women occupy fewer than a quarter of the seats in the world's parliaments and are grossly under-represented among the world's political leaders. The political representation of women is a good test of a country's claim to democracy, argues British political scientist Joni Lovenduski. It is "a fundamental feminist concern, although its importance has not always been acknowledged."1 While real universal suffrage today is seen as a defining criterion of democracy, the continuous under-representation of women might not be labeled undemocratic, but male dominance, without doubt indicates a democratic deficit.

Why does it take such a long time to achieve equality between women and men in political life? To answer this question we have to understand the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, and examine what is known in political science as "the secret garden of politics," that is, the process of selection and nomination of candidates for election.

The theme of this chapter is the presence of women in elected assemblies, also called "descriptive representation" (referring to the numbers of women), as opposed to the "substantive representation" of women (the policy content), which will be discussed later. One would assume that women's representation in democratic countries would exceed the level found in semi- or non-democratic states. However, as this chapter shows, new "fast track" models of development in the Global South are challenging the inertia of the "old" democracies.

Women as intruders

The right to vote and the right to stand for election are usually treated as a single package, since historically these rights have, with a few exceptions, been obtained simultaneously. However, they are not identical issues. The resistance to women entering elected assemblies has been much fiercer than opposition to granting them voting rights, since their access to positions as elected representatives relates directly to the distribution of power in society and challenges the traditional political elites.

The first female politicians were literally intruders into male spaces. "Can we not smoke in Parliament any longer," early twentieth-century male MPs asked anxiously. The bars in the UK Houses of Parliament remained men-only for a long time, and a special Women's Room was established at the Palace of Westminster, as in several other parliaments, after women MPs were admitted. Winston Churchill vividly expressed his sense of women as intruders, as Lady Astor recalled, when she had complained that the male MPs did not speak to her at all: "I remember Winston Churchill, you see . . . He said to me once: 'We hoped to freeze you out,' and then he added: 'When you entered the House of Commons, I felt like a woman had entered my bathroom and I had nothing to protect myself with, except a sponge.'"2 This quotation shows the cultural inertia - or what in neo-institutionalist theory is called the "stickiness" - of the political institutions, which were established before women had the right to enter. Male dominance is much more than just a numerical majority.

What constitutes male dominance in politics?

Let us begin this analysis of the under-representation of women by defining some terms more precisely. Today one hears people talking already about "gender equality," when women have reached 30 percent and men 70 percent - or even about "female dominance" when the share of women approaches 30-40 percent.

According to the categories in Table 2.1, the term "male monopoly" should only be used when referring to a situation in which there are mostly men, with women making up less than 10 percent. Conversely, a female monopoly means a proportion of women of 90 percent or more. This means that we should not refer to "55-59 percent women" among students of law or medicine as cases of "female dominance," as it is sometimes described, but as cases of "gender balance." Meanwhile, the feminist critique of political institutions is much broader in scope than a mere examination of women's numerical under-representation. Moreover, we have to move beyond formal suffrage and into a study of the informal norms and practices of the political institutions.

Table 2.1. Degrees of male dominance based on numerical representation of women

Degree

Percentage of women elected

Male monopoly

< 10

Small minority of women

10-25

Large minority of women

25-40

Gender balance

40-60

Note: In statistical terms, the four degrees are defined as: < 10% women; 10-24.99% women; 25-39.99% women; and 40-60% women and men. The intervals used in the table follow the actual historical development of women's representation, with a very long period of fewer than 10 percent women MPs. Degrees of female dominance can be defined in the same way, but reversed.

Consequently, we will now dig deeper into how democracies, as well as other regimes, fail women. Table 2.2 presents six areas of male dominance, with the numerical dimension listed first. Politics as a workplace, with its written and unwritten rules, forms the second area in which male dominance is to be found. Today, female politicians all over the world complain that inequalities seem to be embedded in the walls of their workplace: from the harsh tone in political debates to exclusion from informal meetings and problems with family obligations when meetings last long into the night, etc. In the British House of Commons, the cross-party All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Women in Parliament issued a report in 2014 recommending a "zero tolerance response to unprofessional behaviour in the Chamber," referring to sexist comments from male MPs.

Table 2.2. Six dimensions of male dominance in politics

1. Representation:

Women's numerical under-representation in elected assemblies

2. Politics as a workplace:

Male-coded norms and practices in elected assemblies

3. Vertical gender segregation:

Unequal gender distribution of positions in political hierarchies

4. Horizontal gender segregation:

Limited access for women to a range of portfolios and committees

5. Public policy:

Policies biased in favor of men. Limited concern for gender equality

6. Discourses and framing:

Gendered perceptions of politicians and of gender equality policies

Source: Dahlerup and Leyenaar (2013), "Introduction," in Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar (eds), Breaking Male Dominance in Old Democracies, Oxford University Press, p. 8.

Another example of male dominance is where women have limited access to positions of power within parliaments and municipal assemblies, such as committee chair, leader of party group or speaker: this is vertical gender segregation, the third dimension. Is Robert Putman's "law of increasing disproportion" still valid, in the sense of "the higher up, the fewer," with regard to women? To what extent is the glass ceiling, a metaphor for this "iron law," being broken? The fourth dimension, horizontal gender segregation, points to the traditional division between men and women in committee work and portfolios, even in governments. We all know that there are many female ministers of social affairs. We will discuss later why we continue to label social policies "soft" issues.

The fifth dimension refers to policy-making. Which issues reach the political agenda and which are excluded? To what extent can public policy still be interpreted as biased in favor of men or groups of men, as was so unmistakably the case when the French Civil Code forbade the search for the father of a child born out of wedlock? Two questions are debated all over the world today. First, why do democracies - and in fact all political regimes - fail to protect women from sexual assaults, crimes which severely restrict women's citizenship rights? And second, why are anti-discrimination regulations still so relatively ineffective that women are still paid less on the labor market than men?

The sixth dimension concerns the gendered perceptions of politicians, especially how women politicians are depicted in the media, and how party leaders - when looking for candidates - tend to frame women within a traditional discourse of what a "strong" politician looks like. The greatest obstacle to change is the conception that the existing political structures are the natural order of things. This was especially relevant in the first decades after...