Monday 30 May 2011

A Woman's Place - Index for 2011

at 9:23 pm by Julie
In the lead-up to the 2008 General Election I put together a series of posts on the gender breakdown of the various party lists (and in some cases covered electorate selections too, where relevant/revealing).  I'm hoping to do this again for 2011, although probably not in a very timely manner.  Maybe I'll get them all done by election day...


Here's what I wrote about doing this series, back in 2008, and it holds true this time around too:
The idea of this analysis is not to say "you should vote for the party with the most women candidates." The point is to provide some information that may give you some insight to the role of women within the party in question, and to also highlight the women who are standing in this year's General Election.

When we our current and immediate past Prime Minister have both been female, a Queen is our Monarch, a woman sits in the Speaker's Chair, and [laydeez] fill a variety of high profile roles in our democratic institutions it is sometimes easy to forget that our current Parliament has only 40 women MPs, out of 122. That's around 33%, when women are a little over 50% of the general population. Better then most other countries in the world, but still a long way from parity.

And how do women get to be MPs? They need to rise up through party organisations to be nominated for electorates and for list spots, and in order to actually make it into the House they need to be candidates in winnable positions. So it's important to not only consider how many women a party puts up as its representatives, but also whether they are likely to get that opportunity in a practical sense.
Huh, guess that whole thing about having women in the roles of Prime Minister and Speaker, has rather changed.  But we still have a lady Queen and Chief Justice, phew.

The 2008 A Woman's Place series (alphabetical order):

The 2011 A Woman's Place series (alphabetical order, added to as I do them):
  • Act 2011 -  22% over whole list (12 out of 55) - 30% in top ten
  • The Conservative Party - 27% over whole list (8 out of 30) - 30% in top ten - also looks at the significant number of candidates not on the list too. 
  • Greens 2011 - 42% over whole list (16 out of 42) - 40% in top ten
  • Labour 2011 - 40% over whole list (32 out of 77) - 40% in top ten, 42% in top 50 - also analyses electorates and likely 40% women in projected caucus
  • National 2011 - 32% over whole list (24 out of 75), 20% in top ten, 28% in top 50 - also analyses electorates and likely 25% women in projected caucus 
  • NZ First 2011 -  15% over whole list (5 out of 33) - 40% in top ten
  • United Future 2011 - 12% over whole list (2 out of 17) - 10% in top ten
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