Roll Call: Is Women's Presence in Politics Enough?
By Lianne Voon
New Zealand has a celebrated history of feminist victories and has led the world with regards to women holding leading political positions. With women making up 41% of Parliament in 2019 and both major parties led by women during the 2020 election year, it would seem that gender representation in politics is encouraging or, at the very least, sufficient.[1]
It is true that women are present in politics. When measured against Hanna Pitkin’s 1967 conception of political representation, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that gender representation in politics is adequate.[2] Moreover, when considered in the context of wider and more recent gender and political research, it would seem that gender representation in politics has become root-bound.
Hanna Pitkin identifies the “representer” (the person from a socially marginalised group) as “making present” the represented party in the political arena by embodying the represented party’s voices, opinions and perspectives.[3] This embodiment is triple-fold. Descriptively, the representer resembles those they represent and symbolically, the ways in which the representer stands for the represented is fundamentally linked to the represented’s nature and identity. Substantively, the actions taken by the representer are taken on behalf of the represented. Women may be present in New Zealand politics in terms of numbers but their presence continues to be systematically undermined both in and outside of the House. As a result, the symbolic and substantial aspects of gender representation are fundamentally compromised, while the relative successes of descriptive gender representation mask these critical problems.
Rachel Simon-Kumar draws on Nancy Fraser’s work on marginality to argue that gender, while a fundamental and salient social dimension, is less and less regarded as a category of disadvantage.[4] As a contemporary marginalising category, gender injustice requires a dual approach: redistributing resources and eliminating social dimensions which promote and perpetuate hierarchies and marginalisation, and recognising diversity and difference, rather than homogenising spaces and organisations.[5] Fraser emphasises that the effectiveness of this dual approach relies heavily on both processes occurring simultaneously, and warns of the danger of favouring either levels of redress due to the inevitable expense of the other.[6] The change from a FPP to MMP system, as well as the efforts of organisations like the Labour Women’s Council and Women’s Electoral Lobby in pushing for more female candidates and their progression to positions of power, were redistributive attempts to combat gender injustices in politics. These attempts saw success and are responsible for the current statistics showing that women are physically present in politics.[7] However, without equal efforts to recognise diversity rather than homogenise, redistributive efforts and their successes undermine symbolic and substantive gender representation. As a result, recognition of gender marginalisation and attempts to address deeper levels of its injustice are stagnating.[8] Women are gaining greater entry into historically male spaces than ever before, yet this often obscures the necessary work of allowing such entry to transform previously exclusive, homogenised spaces.
Politics remains patriarchal in nature and the presence of women has not done as much as was hoped to change this. Michela Insenga’s work on portrayals of political women reveal that gender stereotypes are relentlessly perpetuated and reattached to women within the political arena.[9] Media framing of women in politics pays near-exclusive attention to appearance rather than ability, family status and personal life rather than education and policy aims, and emotional attitudes rather than political vision and the substance of their communications. Media coverage tends towards first-name use with the effect of diminishing perceived authority, and introducing women in politics as the wife, mother, or daughter of another (usually male) person indicating dependency and importance only by association. The characterisation of women in politics by the media is often dichotomous, posing women as either attractive or smart, young or old, or saints or sinners and further implying that women are too much or not enough for the demands of politics. Women’s behaviour is also characterised in media through gendered lens. While the family role is favourable when publicly demonstrated by men, women are often seen as being already committed to domestic obligations which will always compromise her political performance.
Gender expectations around motherhood are particularly weaponised in a variety of ways. New Zealand’s first female prime minister Jenny Shipley was criticised for using her experience as a mother during her election campaign and while Jacinda Ardern was being celebrated as the world’s second elected head of government to give birth in office, a front-page New Zealand Herald article headlined “Back to business: PM Ardern talks about her big tasks ahead” focused on her parenting rather than political business.[10] While women with children are often trivialised, those without — like Helen Clark — are vilified as unable to relate to “normal families” and characterised as cold and inhuman.[11] These gender stereotypes are not only reproduced in opposition to one another but on unequal footing. Feminine characteristics are coded negatively while positive, idealised characteristics like strength and steadfastness being implicitly masculine. Because of this, women in politics become trapped in a double bind where femininity is always disadvantaged and punished, while masculinity is punished and a disadvantage only when expressed by women, leaving them culturally intelligible in politics as ‘babies or bitches’[12] Even Helen Clark, who was represented as effectively leading the nation through five elections and three back-to-back terms, was not immune to misogyny. The 2008 election spawned “ditch the bitch” bumper stickers[13] and throughout her political career, Clark was increasingly characterised as ruthlessly authoritarian, with terms like “political dominatrix” and “Helengrad” being attached to her.[14] Women may be present in the political space but institutionalised gender injustice and misogyny controls the perception and engagement of their presence. While numbers indicating women’s participation in politics are promising, with more women in leadership roles than ever, symbolic representation of women in politics remains marginal and trivialised.
Substantively, Jennifer Curtin argues that the political context is not merely patronising of women but has become hostile to women’s issues and interests.[15] She points to an inherited political culture which is both homo-social and eurocentric, and has remained that way until 1996.[16] Moreover, in 1996, institutional change which allowed for greater descriptive representation did not remake the system but kept intact its adversarial and exclusionary nature. Historically, politics was explicitly a male-only space. Even when women won the vote in 1893, 80 years of parliament passed with women remaining exceptional in the political sphere.[17] While attempts are being made to remove disadvantages for women, much less has been made to identify and remove male advantage and power, which have become embedded over time. A lack of diversity in politics has meant that the dominant party, men, have created systems and rules based in male experiences of politics, legitimised and privileged male knowledge, constructed moral codes which benefit those like them at the expense of others who are not like them, and shaped political culture to perpetuate and promote this as inevitable and natural. Women who enter into this hostile environment are met with high rates of bullying, sexual harassment and violence with little recourse, boundaries to seeking help and making reports, and a demonstrated lack of accountability. An external independent review by Debbie Francis into bullying and harassment in the New Zealand parliamentary workplace notes that there a number of members and ministers well-known for regularly engaging in inappropriate behaviour, who were protected by a “conspiracy of silence” and power imbalances of a “master-servant” nature.[18] Legacies which are only just beginning to be scrutinised have been a significant driving force in the toxic practices that remain in law and politics today.
While redistributive processes of redress have increased gender representation in politics, recognition and thoughtful integration of gender diversity as a simultaneous process of redress has been neglected. Descriptively, women are represented in greater and greater capacity. However, the effects of this representation has not translated into symbolic and substantive representation and victories. Women have fought for and won entry into the political sphere, but the political sphere remains a patriarchal construction where the system is a self-perpetuating collection of barriers to their effective representation.
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Featured Image Source: New Zealand Parliament
[1] Anne Else “Gender Inequalities - Politics and Citizenship” (5 May 2011) Te Ara - Encyclopedia of New Zealand <http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/gender-inequalities/page-3>.
[2] Suzanne Dovi "Political Representation" (29 August 2018) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Fall 2018 Edition <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/political-representation/>.
[3] “Political Representation”, above n 2.
[4] Rachel Simon-Kumar “Differences that matter: From ‘gender’ to ‘ethnicity’ in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand” (2011) Women's Studies Journal, 25(2) <https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/7019> at [76-90].
[5] At [77].
[6] At [77].
[7] “Gender Inequalities – Politics and Citizenship”, above n 1.
[8] “Differences that matter: From ‘gender’ to ‘ethnicity’ in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand”, above n 4, at 79.
[9] Michela Insenga “An analysis of the representation of female members of the United Kingdom parliament in the British press” (2014) European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 10 < https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/AN-ANALYSIS-OF-THE-REPRESENTATION-OF-FEMALE-MEMBERS-Insenga/18ac1bdca87c6efec15230a44331827b656020f5>.
[10] Claire Trevett ”Back to Business” The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand, 3 August 2018) <https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-new-zealand-herald/20180803/281496457095995>.
[11] Linda Trimble ”How the media undermine women political leaders” Policy Options (Canada, 12 September 2018) <https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/september-2018/media-undermine-women-political-leaders/>.
[12] ”An analysis of the representation of female members of the United Kingdom parliament in the British press”, above n 9.
[13] Megan Whelan ”Mike Moore is ’boring’, Jenny Shipley’s a ’vile hag’ - the gender bias in Facebook comments” The Spinoff (New Zealand, 3 May 2017) <https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/03-05-2017/facebooks-gender-problem-mike-moore-is-boring-jenny-shipleys-a-vile-hag/>.
[14] Above n 13.
[15] Jennifer Curtin ”Women, Political Leadership and Substantive Representation: The Case of New Zealand” (July 2008) Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 61, Issue 3 <https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsn014> at 490-504.
[16] Jennifer Curtin ”Rethinking the Representation of Women: Politics and Aotearoa New Zealand’s ’Diversity Dilemma’” (5 August 2020) Youtube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_TkRZA5WQ#action=share>.
[17] Above n 16.
[18] Debbie Francis ”Bully and Harassment in the New Zealand Parliamentary Workplace” (May 2019) Independent External Review <https://www.parliament.nz/media/5739/independent-external-review-into-bullying-and-harassment-in-the-new-zealand-parliamentary-workplace-final-report.pdf> at [39].