It is rarely convenient for your mobile phone’s battery to die. It’s almost always a nuisance. However, last Monday night, 55 minutes and 46 seconds into the ABC’s Q&A my phone dying was a small blessing.
An audience member had just posed this question to the panel:
“There has been some talk recently about targets for female politicians, particularly in the Liberal Party. What’s next: you will have targets for black people, targets for gay people, targets for disabled people? I don’t think we need to label people like that. What happened to just picking people based on merit alone, rather than on gender or race or anything like that?”
Oh boy. Merit! As Jen de Vries wrote on Women’s Agenda last week, merit is used as the ultimate trump card in conversations around the representation of women in almost any setting, but in reality it’s closer to a card trick that favours the status quo.
The host Tony Jones gave the floor to Brendan O’Neill, the editor of spiked and a regular columnist for The Australian. A handful of his observations, and my initial responses, are here:
“Yeah, I think targets or quotas or anything for women in politics is a terrible idea, because those women will never know for sure whether they were selected on the basis of merit or on the basis of their biology.” As opposed to women never knowing for sure whether they’re being denied progression or promotion on the basis of merit or biology?
“When you hear people like Kelly [O’Dwyer] saying earlier this week or last week [that] women need help in Parliament to have the confidence to raise their hand and ask a question, it’s like you’re talking about school children. These are adults. These are autonomous adults.”
Indeed they are. And yet they’re navigating a system in which women hold 22% of positions, at which point it becomes relevant to ask why. And in the ABC interview in which the Federal member for Higgins and parliamentary secretary to the Treasurer, Kelly O’Dwyer suggested targets be considered in the Liberal party, she didn’t say women need help to ask questions. She said it’s worth considering looking at what factors can help women consider putting their hands up for parliament.
“They have freedom. They have autonomy. And the problem is that women are being infantilised by this process. So much of modern feminism actually infantilises women by treating them as incapable of negotiating public life on their own without the assistance of the government or targets and so on.” To the contrary, feminism doesn’t treat individual women as incapable of anything. It recognises the structural biases and systemic shortcomings in institutions that render women less able to attain and hold leadership positions, and seeks to address them.
“And the thing I find really obnoxious about this discussion is the idea that women make politics more consensual and more conciliatory and more friendly and what you have is the rehabilitation of the old prejudice that this is the fairer sex, that they’re mothering, that they’re caring.” Probably best not to delve into what I find really obnoxious at this point.
“I think we need to let women go, let them run on their own and they will make it on their own.” Except that it’s clear that, to date, they can’t make it on their own. Is this because women truly are inherently less meritorious than men? Or is it because the system perceives men to be more meritorious than women?
Anyway, at this point being unable to access my phone on Monday night was quite useful. Where would I have begun?
The Federal member for Higgins and parliamentary secretary to the Treasurer, Kelly O’Dwyer, did a decent job at responding.
“It is actually important that Parliament reflect our population and our diversity and our Parliament does not reflect our society. Fifty per cent and more of our society is women and we don’t see that reflected in the Parliament. Now, all I’m simply saying is not that you don’t preselect women based on merit, that you don’t preselect people based on merit. In fact, you know, of course, you’ve got to get the right people for the job. What I’m simply saying is that we do need to acknowledge that particularly in my party, and I’ve spoken about my party, the others can talk about their own parties here, but we do need to see more women in the Parliament and that only by having a target can you actually measure your progress.”
I put this to the side of my mind for the rest of the week. But yesterday it was the inimitable Annabel Crabb who brought the necessary wisdom and insight to O’Neill’s argument that women would rue the day they had to question whether merit or biology determined their roles. In her Fairfax Media column on Sunday she wrote:
“O’Neill’s point, however, about quotas infusing women forever with the visceral fear that they have been promoted for their boobs and not their brains, is an entirely fair one.
Can you imagine how dreadful it would feel – how soul-sapping – for a human being to suspect on any level that their success was attributable to their genetic equipment rather than their merit?
It would be paralysing. Imagine the shame.
I certainly hope nothing like that ever occurs to the 97 per cent of chief executives of major Australian companies who are male. Or to the 90 per cent of cabinet members who happen, thanks to an – I’m sure – entirely unrelated coincidence, also to have been favoured at birth not only with superior merit, but also with certain crucial dangly bits.
Horrible thought! According to the 2013 Women In Media Report, 80 per cent of experts and commentators quoted in Australian newspapers are male. Nobody tell Brendan O’Neill, please. I’m not sure he could bear the uncertainty, next time he is asked for his opinion.
Let us pray that no man ever wakes in fright, wondering why exactly it is that he is nine times more likely than a female competitor to make it to a senior leadership role in a big organisation, despite the fact that female university graduates have outnumbered male ones for nearly two decades.”
Indeed. So often the focus is on women being underpaid and underrepresented when it comes to the gender gap. But what about the flipside? Why are men overwhelming better remunerated than women? Why are men nine times more likely to hold a position in Cabinet than women? These are the questions that need to be posed and scrutinised as often as we ask the counter questions.