rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Where are the women?

by Vicky Smallman

Well, the election is upon us. Finally. After a frustrating spring session with any number of votes that should have brought the government down (but didn’t), Stephen Harper finally pulled the plug.

I’ll leave it to others to comment about the timing. Me, I’m paying more attention to who’s running.

For decades now, the political glass ceiling in Canada has remained fixed at 21%. There are plenty of obstacles keeping women from running - fundraising and family obligations, to name a couple - but the biggest seems to be political parties themselves. Voters have shown time and time again that they are more than willing to elect women when given the opportunity. Parties, on the other hand, don’t seem too keen on nominating them.

Equal Voice, a multipartisan organization that advocates for women’s participation in government, has been tracking the nominations of women in federal elections since 2004. In between elections, they encourage the parties to address some of their internal barriers and take active steps toward nominating more women.

After considerable pressure, all the parties committed to running more women in this election. The good news: they are. The not-so-good news: a heck of a lot of these women are running in ridings where they don’t stand a real chance of winning the seat.

With about two thirds of the nominations complete, the picture is this:

Conservatives have nominated 258 candidates thus far. 19% are women.

Liberals have 234 candidates, and 36% are women.

The NDP has 39% female candidates among the 193 they have nominated.

The Bloc has nominated 58 candidates out of 75, and 33% are women.

The Greens - the only party with a woman at the helm - have 115 candidates named so far. 30% of these are women.

A far cry from the 50% some of us would like to see, but definitely better than last time.

A look at where these women are running paints a slightly less rosy picture. Conservative women are running in 13% of their winnable ridings, Liberal women in 24%, New Democrats in 35% and the Bloc in 32%. If these numbers don’t shift in the next two weeks as more candidates are nominated, we’re not looking at much of a change in the next Parliament, no matter what the outcome. Women are going to have to wait longer for a breakthrough.

We may even have to wait for baby steps.