Update: a corrected (and less ranty) version of this has now been published on New Matlida:
https://newmatilda.com/2013/09/25/coalition-tokenism-numbers
The twitter-length rhetoric has been flitting thick and fast all week over the announcement of the first Abbott Ministry. For example, “Julie Bishop, token woman” is the sort of accusation that keeps the news cycle cheerfully bobbing along for days; a perfect news balloon needing only the venting of angry flapping heads to sustain it. Political reporters on a deadline can do this in their sleep: no need for research or investigation, just poke, prod and soundbite this week’s selection of media-whores, until the next story appears to be duly stripped of all meaningful content and converted into the media-balance crack which keeps it all going without ever going anywhere. In the meantime of course the details of political history and precedent can be happily be ignored, because facts about what is actually at stake here and why anyone should actually care don’t make for a reliable business model.
In the place of facts we get factoids; one-off comparisons
to cabinets foreign or past, with little historical or statistical context and
little measured discussion of what’s actually at stake. So what's at stake here, and how much of a throwback is this
cabinet actually? Well I can’t be too definitive about the first part, because
my penis keeps getting in the way. But I can offer some limited analysis about
the second.
Here’s how bad it actually is: for it to be worse, you have
to go back to a time before there were any women in cabinet at all.
Rather than get completely wordy about this, I’ve tried to
illustrate all these tedious facts by graphing the proportion of women in the
house, senate, and cabinet since women first entered the Australian parliament
in 1943 (this includes changes in proportion due to elections, but also
retirements, added seats, etc. Data sourced from the Parliament Handbook and
Wikipedia). The additional dotted line is the proportion of women in cabinet
divided by the proportion of women in parliament as a whole: the cabinet parity
rate representing the relative utilisation of available parliamentary women in
cabinet positions (compared to men). If women were appointed in equal numbers,
then the solid lines would be at 50% (meaning women made up half of the body in
question), and the dotted line would be at 100% (meaning that female
parliamentarians would be just as likely to get cabinet jobs as their male
counterparts). This is only raw ‘bums on seats’ numbers of course (the actual
power wielded is not nearly as quantifiable), but the way these numbers move is
pretty interesting.
As you can see, the political representation of women was
somewhat woeful in the immediate post-war period, with women dropping out of
the lower house by the early 1950s and meagre senate numbers dwindling in the
late sixties and early seventies, before a mild Whitlam rebound and the first
cabinet appointment. And it was indeed Fraser’s Liberals who took the lady
plunge. One woman had previously been promoted to the outer ministry by Holt in
1966, however all cabinet ministers prior to 1976 (including Whitlam’s) had not
one ovary among them. There’d been a few Lesley’s in there, but they’d punch
you if you said they had a girl’s name.
And the most visually dramatic feature of the graph occurs
with that appointment. The dotted line actually peaks outside the area of the
plot at 249%: this is because by having just one woman out of a cabinet of 15
the first Fraser ministry was two-and-a-half times more representative than the
houses of parliament themselves (6.7% woman vs 2.7% women).
This meagre statistical victory was short lived. From 1976
until 1993 there was one woman in cabinet, and one woman only. From ministry to
ministry, Coalition and Labor, the Fraser, Hawke and Keating administrations
made sure that the ladies were represented by one lady exactly. The lady was
rotated of course, but for that stretch of time - almost half the time that
there have been women in cabinet - the plural form of ‘women in cabinet’ didn’t
really apply.
Since then, the gradual increase in the number of women in
parliament chewed away at the relative over-representation of that single
cabinet seat, which dropped to worse than a two-to-one underutilisation during
the Hawke government. The quota was raised to two with the second Keating
ministry, a quota that stayed in place for another eight years. And this is why
terms like ‘token’ or ‘quota’ are apt: the numbers are implausibly steady
(amongst the chaos) for them to not be stabilised by gender considerations. If
you were to plot the proportion of green-eyed or red-haired cabinet ministers
for example there’s no way you would see such stability in the absolute numbers,
and there is nothing like the volatility here that you would expect looking at
the fluctuating proportions of women in the wider house and senate. Call this
tokenism or quota if you like, but I’ll also add another word here for the sake
of semantic balance: ‘cap’.
Until earlier this year, the Fraser and Keating ‘bumps’ represented
the two highest points of female ministerial parity. Since the late Howard
government there have always been at least three women in cabinet, with as many
as five under Gillard (including herself of course) and briefly six in the
second Rudd ministry between June and September this year. This was a milestone
of sorts: the first time that women parliamentarians actually hit parity in the
modern era (101% parity rate to be precise), i.e. to be just as likely to be make
it to cabinet as men while also being marginally well represented in parliament
as a whole (30%).
Which brings us to the newly announced Abbott ministry.
Whichever way you cut it, the numbers are not just a blast from the past: they
out-pathetic the whole history of female cabinet appointments and the graph
lines that matter here both take an unprecedented dive.
Let’s start with the absolute number first though. Having
only one woman cabinet minister is hardly unprecedented: the lone woman was a
constant feature of cabinets for the first 18 years of there being any at all.
However for more than half of that
time period marital rape was still legal – it’s easy to forget that this was a
very different age. Gender relations have progressed somewhat since those days,
and moving back to them at the top echelons of political power is genuinely
jarring in a way that only the most politically myopic can fail to see.
Even ignoring the shock factor, the relative power that a
single cabinet post represents is smaller than in those days as well. Cabinets
in Fraser’s day had 15 ministers, not the 19 decking out Abbott’s. While she
may protest her more senior status within cabinet as a mitigating factor, when
considered as a numerical proportion of cabinet Julie Bishop is outnumbered
like no other woman before her. Actually that’s not quite true: Keating’s first
ministry briefly shared the same ratio, but a cabinet where 94.6% of the ministers
have dicks is still the closest Australia’s been to 100% since it actually was
100%.
What makes the current situation definitively worse though
is the parity ratio; at below 20% it is now twice as low as it ever was under
the most miserly tokenism of the 80s and 90s. Pick one random man from
parliament and one random woman: the man is more than five times more likely to
have been made a cabinet minister by Abbott. The ratio has never been that skewed before. And it’s 2013.
Now you can argue back and forth about merit, or about whether
Julie Bishop is a ‘token woman’ or not, and as Annabel Crabb has stated some good reasons to say ‘not’. If she’s a ring-in, then she’s certainly a
long term one. But I guess that’s what the real accusation is here – that she’s
a good politician who nevertheless seems resigned to be the perennial fig leaf
deputy; providing photo-op balance for three male liberal leaders now and never
seriously in contention to look like a leader in waiting herself (Keating,
Costello, Gillard… Bishop? It might be my own biases at work here but she
doesn’t seem like that kind of deputy). In any case, she’s not really the issue at all. The real
tokenism is evidenced by the women now disproportionately filling out the ranks
of parliament’s backbench and opposition – they are the real token women of today’s
political system, and the glass ceiling has just smashed them in the face as it
never has before. It’s really not a good look.
There are a million and one further things to say about the
hows and whys of this situation; about how the number of women in the lower
house has plateaued and appears to be decreasing, about the coalition’s imbalance
and promotion practices specifically, about their lack of female pre-selection
in winnable seats (you don’t get into cabinet by winning a marginal) and of
course about the whole public churn of accusation, insinuation and dodgy
rhetoric about merit. I’m not going to get into that. I’m just here to say that
in the entire history of women in cabinet (and in that context), Abbott’s new
ministry is the worst there’s ever been. Fact.
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