Not So Far From Home

As the week rolls inexoribly to the national exec meeting this weekend, and Mark Merrison throws his support behind Stephane Dion, I wanted to revisit one of the issues I don't have a solution to. I was struck by the following thoughts from Akaash while in Jordan:

The one conversation that most stood out for me was with Adab Al-Saoud, a female Jordanian MP. Adab is a former social worker elected to parliament as an independent. Although I am half a world away from home, her concerns about life as a parliamentarian could have been uttered by any MP in Ottawa. Her home is some distance from the capital, and being separated from her husband and children for long stretches of time wears on her. She feels that she is making a difference in parliament, but she is uncertain whether she is making as much of a difference as she did in her previous career. She is dismayed by the lack of women in parliament, still more concerned by the lack of women in the executive branch of government, and feels that politics are held back by the gender imbalance.

During the election I posted a little bit on the gender balance of the 38th parliament and hesitantly came to the conclusion that the actual election process seems to not the be weak link in the woman's equality chain when it comes to electoral politics but instead it seemed to me that we should lay blame with the nomination process. While I usually mistrust the conventional wisdom, my opinion is shared by more than one "expert" in the area.

There was a bit of a hickup in my theory however, anecdotal evidence suggests that political parties are more than willing to go recruiting female candidates, it seems that for one reason or another many of these women aren't interested in saying yes. As I said at the time:

Is it possible that the real reason that so few women are in elected office in Canada is not that the rules are against them but that they are against the rules? It's a pretty narrow distinction to make but I think it's a legitimate one. I think the largest reason that more women aren't elected is because they don't want to be. Let me put it another way: elected office is a sacrifice, but it is a much larger sacrifice for women than for men.

Oddly enough not more than a couple days later I heard an "expert" on the subject say exactly the same thing, "elected office is a sacrifice, but it is a larger sacrifice for women than for men."

What struck me about the conversation that Akaash described is both the apparant universality of this challenge but also the fact that for all our assumptions that our democratic institutions are healthier than those of places like Jordan, here we find that both nations are fighting the same battle.

In a time where Canadian are debating what ails the medicare system and British Columbian's are facing up to the harsh reality that millions of children face in our province, I too am "dismayed by the lack of women in parliament, still more concerned by the lack of women in the executive branch of government, and [feel] that politics [is] held back by the gender imbalance."
My hat goes off to the dozens of women in the Liberal Party who pay the price of public service, while their families and marriages may also pay a cost, I am confident that our nation is the better for their service and I hope that one day, it will no longer be as high a price to pay for women to win elections.