Worldwide, the countries with the highest levels of female political representation tend to use PR.37 With this in mind, and given South Korea’s and Sweden’s experiences, perhaps the UK’s Women and Equalities Committee shouldn’t have called for quotas as a first step. If they really want to see female representation increase in Parliament, perhaps their first demand should be full electoral reform. But increasing female representation is only half the battle, because it’s not much use getting women elected if they’re prevented from doing their job effectively once they’re there. And frequently, they are.
Clare Castillejo, a specialist in fragile states, writes that women’s influence in government is often limited by their exclusion from male-dominated patronage networks.38 Women may be present at formal talks, but this isn’t much good if the men are forming backroom quid pro quo networks (something Castillejo cautions is particularly common in post-conflict settings39) and going off to have the real discussion in ‘informal spaces that women cannot access’.40
The practice of excluding women from decision-making is widespread, and it is one of the most efficient ways (second only to not electing women at all) that this male-biased system has of siphoning off gendered data in the form of female life experience and perspective. In a 2011 survey of US legislators, 40% of women disagreed with the statement ‘The leaders in my legislature are as likely to consult with the women in the legislature as the men when making important decisions’ (interestingly, only 17% of men disagreed with it).41 Similarly, a 2017 report on local government in the UK referenced ‘informal networks within local government where real power lies’ and in which women are ‘less likely to be involved’.42
But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men.43 During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times.44And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment45) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’,46 although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.47
Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50
Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia.
The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).
Political abuse is a distinctly gendered phenomenon.51 During the 2016 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton received almost twice as many abusive tweets as Bernie Sanders. The most common word associated with her was ‘bitch’. Bitch was also the most common term used in tweets about Australian ex-PM Julia Gillard, who between 2010 and 2014 was similarly the target of almost twice as many abusive messages as her political rival Kevin Rudd. One European MP told the IPU that she once received more than 500 rape threats on Twitter over a period of four days.52 Another woman had been sent information about her son – ‘his age, the school he attends, his class, etc. – threatening to kidnap him’.
Sometimes it’s not ‘just’ threats. More than one in five female parliamentarians surveyed by the IPU had been ‘subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence’, while a third had witnessed sexual violence being committed against a female colleague. During the 2010 elections in Afghanistan, nearly all of the female candidates received threatening phone calls,53 and some female MPs in the country require round-the-clock protection.54 ‘Almost every day I fear for my life,’ Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian in 2014;55 a year later one of her female colleagues died in a car bomb – the second deadly attack on a female politician in Afghanistan in the space of three months.56
The aggression seems to increase along with the proportion of female politicians. Research from around the world (including saintly Scandinavia) has shown that as female representation increases, so does hostility against female politicians.57 Especially from their male colleagues. Studies58 in the US and New Zealand have shown that men ‘become more verbally aggressive and controlling of both committee hearings and parliamentary debates following an expansion in the proportion of women in the legislature’. Another study found that as the proportion of women in US Congress increases (bear in mind Congress is only 19.4% female59), women are less likely to achieve leadership positions within their parties.60 Further research61 from the US and Argentina has shown that having large numbers of female legislators is ‘tied to both women’s diminished success in passing legislation and reduced chances of being appointed to “masculine” and “powerful” Committees’.62 In a similar vein, US analysis has found that framing human rights issues as women’s rights issues makes male politicians less likely to support legislation, and if a rights bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down and states are less likely to invest resources.63 It seems that democracy – in so far as it pertains to women – is broken.
Working in the context of such extreme psychological warfare inevitably affects women’s ability to do their jobs. Many women told the IPU that they had restricted their travel, made sure they went home before nightfall, or only travelled when accompanied.64 Others self-censor, particularly when it comes to speaking up about women’s issues65 (which tend to generate the most aggression66), some going as far as dispensing with social media altogether, and in this way deprive themselves ‘of a forum in which to disseminate and debate their ideas’.