Quotidian

While noodling around the Australian Parliament I came across a wall covered in pictures of current senators and MPs. I was really surprised by how many women were up there; it looked like at least 50%.

In fact, it's not 50%, but it is in the high 40's - a bit better than Canada. I was not so surprised by Canadian MPs but I didn't know we had a significant number of women senators, but apparently we do.

Anyway, not sure about Canada, but in Australia, all of this is abetted by quotas. These exist at the party level only, but I think all major parties have them. The ALP, their labour party, has a 40-40-20 system aiming to have 40% of each gender minimum. They implement this by making sure the required #s are in primaries of "winnable seats", eg. they don't just dump women into unwinnable ridings and call that good enough.

Interestingly, from the Australian government web site, neither Canada nor Australia is in the top 10 for female politicians; and even more interestingly, many of the countries that are are ones that you probably wouldn't associate with gender equality. Even more interestingly, some of them don't even have quotas, so how this all came about would be another rabbit hole to go down.




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