Green co-leader James Shaw announced at the CTU conference last week that in any future government, when the Greens are at the Cabinet table, at least half of their seats will be filled by women.
Cue the #manban headlines.
But seriously, Shaw showed some good, clear thinking here on an issue which so often gets swamped with #notallmen whining or #butwhataboutmerit or #reversesexism!!!
Take a look at our current Parliament which is seventy percent male. Or Cabinet, which governs the country, also seventy percent male.
No one seriously thinks all those guys are there because they’re the best of the best, or that they’ve all got so much more merit than any female politicians.
The reality is that it’s a traditionally male institution.
There were legal and social barriers preventing women from entering. And those overt barriers are gone but many subtle barriers remain.
And just to really reach the psyche of ~middle New Zealand~ (I’m joking, James, you’re doing good work here) he goes for the king of metaphors:
I’m going to steal a trick from our friend John Key here – this is his only trick – and use an All Blacks analogy.
Imagine if we had a coach who almost always picked players from only the North Island, or only the South Island to join the squad.
And they said ‘We pick whoever is best for the team,’ but the team kept losing all its matches.
How long would the nation put up with that? I think you could measure it in seconds before everyone said, ‘This is stupid. This isn’t working. You need to pick players from the whole country.’
That’s what’s happened with the representation of women in politics for decades.
And it isn’t working.
It’s trite but it’s true. You have two options: either admit you think women as a group aren’t as good as men as a group, or acknowledge that there are barriers – human-made, inorganic barriers – to women’s advancement on a par with men.
Or as Catherine Delahunty put it:
Stephanie Rodgers 