Christopher Pyne was moved this week to lament the lack of women in Parliament and the Liberal Party's failure to enable "career-minded women to choose public life". For a politician who frequently presents as a strong believer in old-fashioned gender roles, this was a lament to make fellow Liberals sit up and take notice. Victorian backbencher Sharman Stone quickly fell in behind Mr Pyne, noting that the number of Liberal women MPs had actually decreased over the past two decades. Indeed, of the current crop of federal Liberal MPs, only 22 per cent are women. By contrast, 45 per cent of Labor's representatives are women; and at its national conference last weekend, the party set a target of 50 per cent within a decade.
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The question of female underrepresentation in parliaments generally evokes a universal response: we should try to ensure 50 per cent of MPs are women. Some go further by arguing that women should comprise 50 per cent of the executive as well. But exactly how gender equality might be achieved is a far more problematic issue, especially for Liberals.
While arguing the necessity of getting "the very important input women provide to cabinet, to parliaments, to party rooms", Mr Pyne does not believe in targets or quotas for the Liberal Party. The Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women, Michaelia Cash, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, and Victorian backbencher Kelly O'Dwyer share the same view. That distaste for interventions (which apparently extends to aspirational targets) reflects an otherwise unshakeable belief in meritocracy.
The barriers to greater female participation in politics – and, for that matter, the upper echelons of academia and the professional and corporate worlds – are many and varied, but relate principally to the incompatibility of child-rearing and career advancement, hinged as this frequently is on working long hours. It's likely the adversarial nature of politics, particularly when contesting pre-selections for safe seats, is an added obstacle to women's participation. And even with the whole-hearted support of a spouse, women intent on political careers frequently have to make great personal sacrifices.
Mr Pyne's idea of establishing a Liberal Party support network to convince more young women to run for public office is a worthy idea, but it's unlikely to redress matters entirely. Targets or quota can work, too, as the Labor Party has demonstrated. What seems especially crucial to success is a party culture that unreservedly welcomes female participation (and not just in auxiliary or support roles), that actively encourages its more ambitious female members to stand for pre-selection, and that rewards their drive and ambition by giving them due consideration when ministerial positions are being allocated.
Given its distaste for quotas, the Liberal Party would seem to have little alternative but to pursue an unambiguously inclusive embrace of its female members. To dodge this challenge is to run the risk of looking like an organisation that's increasingly out of step with mainstream thinking. If Mr Pyne recognises this, then so, too, will voters.
