How Can Canada Elect More Women MPs?
By Gregory D. Morrow

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This week, Stephane Dion announced that he would mandate that a minimum of 33% of Liberal candidates would be women. And to ensure that this quota is met, Dion would use his powers as leader to appoint female candidates. While Dion’s intentions are right, I’m not sure how many Canadians would be willing to forego the democratic election of local candidates in order to ensure Dion’s 33% quota is met.

There is little doubt that the lack of women MPs is a serious problem in our political system — four out of five federal MPs are men. And since parliament sets policies and laws that impact everyone, having 80% men seriously undermines its credibility. Therefore, gender parity is an important — no, essential — goal. While Canadians often pat themselves on the back for having more women representatives than the U.S. does (21% in Canada, 15% in the U.S.), a global comparison shows that Canada badly lags other developed nations.

So why does Canada not have more women MPs? It’s a complex question, of course, but I would suggest that it begins with our particularly confrontational form of government. Anyone who has watched the performances in daily question period knows full well that the louder you shout, the better chance you’ll be heard — the more bombastic, the better. In such an environment, testosterome is a handy thing. Polling indicates that this combative atmosphere turns off many would-be women politicians.

This confrontational approach stems from our electoral system that demands that parties emphasize difference between one another, no matter how small. We have a winner-take-all system — if you get one more vote than your closest rival, you win, they lose. I have always wondered if our first-past-the-post system was a barrier to gender parity. So I decided to test this, by pulling global data on women representatives, and comparing it to the electoral systems used in different countries. Naturally, there are cultural factors that play a role, so we cannot simply explain the high proportion of women MPs in Scandinavia (38% on average) or the low proportion of women representatives in the Middle East (6% on average) due to the electoral systems alone. But, we can make generalizations.

Here is the regional summary of women representatives:

From this chart, the most obvious observation is that women are severely under-represented worldwide — despite representing 51% of the world’s population, just 16% of the world’s national-level politicians are women. The second thing one notices is that there is a wide discrepancy by region. Scandinavia is far-and-away the most representative, averaging 38%, followed by Austrailia and New Zealand at 29% and Western Europe at 24%. At the other end of the spectrum is the South Pacific at just 3%, the Middle East at just 6% and Central Asia at 11%.

More interestingly for the debate in Canada, is whether tweaking our electoral system to add an element of proportionality would increase the share of women in the House of Commons. There are only 4 electoral systems used by more than one free country (see Freedom House for definition): 1) the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system that is used in Canada, 2) a list-proportional-representation system (list PR) used throughout Europe, 3) a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system that combines FPTP and list PR so that proportional seats are used to compensation parties with high vote share but low seat share, and 4) a parallel system, which is like MMP, except that the proportional seats are not assigned with regard to FPTP seats. Here is a summary of these four systems with respect to women representatives:

Mixed-member systems perform the best, averaging 30% women MPs, but, since it is a newer system, it is used only in New Zealand, Germany, and Mexico among the free countries (it is used in Scotland and Wales within the UK, however). List proportional systems are widely popular, and produce good results — averaging 26% women MPs — and accounting for 17 of the top 20 countries with the highest share of women MPs. Parallel systems perform slightly worse, averaging 21% women MPs, and our first-past-the-post system produces the worst, averaging 18% women MPs (*Note: these proportions are for the top 100 countries — when all countries are included, the averages are 26% MMP, 24% List PR, 21% Parallel and 18% FPTP).

This evidence lends support to the increasing calls to add an element of proportionality to our system. I, for one, find MMP systems attractive, as they combine the best of our current single-member constituency system, with the best of Europe’s list PR system. That it averages the highest proportion of women MPs of any of the four electoral systems, suggests yet another reason why it deserves our attention. For additional information see charts below.

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