Sorry to blow the thunder but due to a recount in one of the constituencies we no longer have a female majority in the Parliament. 3 women lost their seats to men.
Oh gosh, the comment section will be fun no doubt.
Anyway, as a matter of curiosity I counted the Dutch parliament, and 60 out of 150 seats are taken by women, or exactly 40%. I was just curious how it compares (data isn't on the website, so I just counted manually from the pictures, may be off by one or two members by accident; data at [1]).
I had expected the younger MPs to be more balanced, but it seems it's the 40-50 bracket that's the "most equal": almost 50%, vs. 20% of under 40s. Not sure what to make of this; maybe women are more likely to go in to politics after pregnancy? Not sure...
Would be interesting to do a more detailed analysis over more elections.
fascinating that there first possibility considered is something related to pregnancy, rather than something about having grown up in the 1970's and before vs 1980's and above! Can't think of any single generational difference either?
For myself, I can tell with certainty that having small child and bigger one is massive differences in terms of how much time I have for other things. In general, women are more likely to be primary care giver, so this can make difference.
It's just that it's the major and obvious difference between the lives of men and women, and it seems like a logical place to start. Undoubtedly there are other factors too – my comment wasn't intended as a complete explanation.
> something about having grown up in the 1970's and before vs 1980's and above! Can't think of any single generational difference either?
Sorry, after a recount that finished in the northwest constituency just over an hour ago this isn't valid anymore. Women are not in the majority anymore.
One of the great things about equality is that women get to be terrible people too, given the same opportunities. We're not some magical race of angels.
Ah I see. So you'd rather have a random selection of people attempting to do jobs they're not much good at, who are lucky enough to possess certain characteristics. Right...
Why do you think May and Johnson are incredibly bad at this?
Their party's ideology?
And that those folks usually can't relate to the normal person on the street?
Which results in them not really giving a toss about them or not caring about what it means to cut £20 weekly for people already struggling while we are going into winter with higher energy prices.
I've always had the feeling Thatcher was overcompensating for being a woman by being "the tough guy". It worked, too; in the early days of the Clinton presidency Hillary – already more than ten years after Thatcher got elected – famously got asked for a cookie recipe. No one would have dared ask Maggie for her cookie recipes (but have Dennis had some?)
It's understandable to some degree, but in such a position it has real consequences for people.
I always look at how the gender ratio is in high-ranking and low-ranking party members. Usually the ratio is quite similar, which is most likely optimal from a equality perspective I'd say.
We've asked you before not to use HN for ideological flamewar, and you've continued to do it. If you keep that up, we will also ban you, so no more of this, please.
This event is not being regarded as notable because it is a goal in and of itself (to most people). It's notable because it has never happened before, was unthinkable in the not so recent past, and is a reflection on positive changes in society at large that now it is a thing that can happen.
I assume GP is talking the world in general, but it was indeed "unthinkable in the not so recent past" even for Iceland: for example, in 1975 (which I guess you'll agree as being "not-so-recent") there were only three women parliamentarians.
Politicians doesn't change overnight as barriers are removed. A man who entered the field in his 20's 1975 got retired just about now, that is how long it takes for change to fully propagate throughout society. So if 1975 was the year that it got equally acceptable for men and women to enter the field now is about the time you'd expect men and women to have equal seats in politics.
And that graph lacks the last election result, Sweden currently has 47% female parliament members, so about even by now.
Edit: Looks like USA is about where Sweden was 35 years ago on this. Reminds me how different cultures can be, and why the American gender discussions are so different from what I'm used to. So I guess USA might see a gender equal parliament in about 35-40 years.
Because not being represented by representatives of the same category (in kind of category: sex, race, social background, wealth...) in democracy diminish your chances that your rights will be defended.
If women aren't part of parliaments, we can't expect women's rights to advance significantly and all people (including men) would greatly benefit from this (better collaboration, more peaceful society).
I guess Western societies are quite decent defending and increasing the rights of underrepresented people, given that in the past century (or so), women got the vote, non-Westerners got citizenship (and therefore voting) rights, ...
It took a lot of pressure till those groups got those rights. And they wanted those voting rights so that they can push for stuff they want. Yes, dictatorships can be even worst in that regard, considering they oppress majority groups quite a lot too.
Not if she's the only one in charge (i.e less representation of women in other democratic instance). Anyone can turn against their fellows, men and women
It's not clear to me that an even split among genders in governance is an indicator of gender equality. Wouldn't it be more something like gender non-relevance for governance? If a trait doesn't matter for a given task, you would expect that trait to probably be proportional in the sample as it is in the population.
Nobody is saying the most important thing about a politician is their sex. It's not suggested by any of the commentary here either, except the trolls like yourself.
If you did not cared, you would ignored the title and clicked elsewhere.
It is news, because it is outlier. Generally, parliaments these days have some women in them, but not nearly half. Except countries where there are no women in parliaments.
If this event is not meaningful to you, then don't care.
This event is meaningful to women.
If you don't possess the capacity for the empathy necessary to intuit why this is meaningful, then I don't think someone explaining it to you will make a difference.
You have a very broken idea (just like most equality supporters) about what gender equality is. It should be equal opportunity not equal outcome. The usual argument about having a parliament divided 50/50 is that the population is divided roughly 50/50. But everybody always somehow forgets that even women voters aren't voting for women...
There is a difference between "parliament should always be 50/50" and "parliament has always (until today) skewed in one direction, that suggests a problem".
So if women voters for the most part have thought that a man is the better candidate there is a problem? Maybe i am just misunderstanding and basing my opinion on how election system works in my country which i think is gender equal - anyone can make a party (obviously you have to be a citizen) as long as you get the minimum amount of party members, you can run in the election and the election itself is based on votes per party + votes for each candidate within that party (+/- system). So if a party gets 5 seats in the parliament, the top most "upvoted" candidates get those seats.
There is nothing preventing women from creating a party which would appease to the women voters and running for election. That is equality. But nowadays it is easier to blame sexism and whatnot if the result is something you don't like (women not voting for the women centric party).
If, in a vacuum, men and women are equally viable as members of parliament, then a 50/50 split in parliament should be about the average in a society without bias on the part of the system or the people.
Except the world does not operate in only black and white - not everybody goes to vote, not everybody becomes a politician, not everybody has the same political views etc. This can be seen in gender equality/feminist "success" countries where when people are more or less free to choose, the distribution is not 50/50 and some groups of people simply don't want to agree to the fact that men and women can be different and want different things in life.
Right, it should be "men and women were equally likely to seek political office and ..." to account for the sexes seeming to prefer different occupations.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that in my comment. In any case, I think there are many countries where the lower number of women in parliament is largely/partially due to systemic/social factors, as opposed to biological factors.
But I don’t know if any broad studies that would indicate that being a politician is something that suits males on some biological level. If anything politics seems like a very female endeavor(stereotypically), since you’re organizing a community and highly communicating complex sociological ideals with peers of various education levels.
That’s extremely wishy washy. Women may be more socially oriented than men when it comes to work, for example, but the nature of this social disposition and inclination is different than the kind that is fruitful in politics. The motive and the end matter.
What I am missing is, that women do actually get pregnant at times. And when they do, they have rightfully other things on their mind.
Now becoming a father is surely something that got my mind busy, too, but I was still able to give 100% the whole time, without vomitting on the toilet, or having to spend the day in bed. Meaning I could have done a political campaign in that time, but my female partner physically could have not.
So demanding 50/50 either requires even more effort from the women, meaning giving birth to children AND pursue 100% (political) career - or it means, lowering standards because of sex? Meaning voting for someone because of sex and not because of competence. (sounds like sexism, no?)
In other words, it is complicated and I try to for myself to just focus on the competence on the person and not their gender (or race,...).
There is something called "opportunity cost". Small kids demand more, than just physical inconvenience during pregnancy. And small kids usually require their mother. (I cannot breast feed for example and mother milk is still quite superior to the industrial milk, but it is about more than that)
So all of it is time and energy, that could not be invested into a political career.
Have a baby and be out of the game for some time and you will have to struggle to catch up to those, who did not have a baby.
So I find it not surprising, that we do not have 50/50 for leadership positions, as they usually require intense effort, before reaching that. (networking, building skills, reputation ...)
So should we find ways, to support women more, to not "just be mothers", but also going other ways? Absolutely. But maybe we can start with not degrading women who are "just mothers" - as being a good mum, can be a 24h job.
So I think the idea that women should be mothers AND have successful careers (and preferable both at once), just creates uncecessary pressure and stress. And the 50/50 idea creates that, in my opinion.
I’m not sure we can separate the two so cleanly, equality of opportunity comes along with all of a child’s inputs and external forces as they’re growing. Equality of opportunity would absolutely mean not funneling them in one direction or another based on something like their sex, gender, or whatever.
A 50/50 outcome might be a flawed measurement of something like equality of opportunity if it were the only measurement we were using, but I don’t think it is the only thing we see.
When we consider the not too distant past, this ratio indicates we are probably doing something correctly to mitigate those external forces that used to funnel people into (or away from) certain professions purely because of something like which sex they were born.
We don’t yet have an agreed upon and accurate way to measure whether or not we are indeed offering equality of opportunity, and until we do, seeing something like this at least indicates we’re much closer than we were 20, 30, or 100 years ago.
> equality of opportunity comes along with all of a child’s inputs and external forces as they’re growing
This reminds me of the nature vs nurture debates.
"A child’s inputs and external forces" is a funny name to call their parents and teachers. Because it's mostly their parents and teachers that are going to have an influence in their education. And if they do spend more time, money and effort to boost the education of their children, then it's a family and teacher merit. It's not unfair when their children do better.
An even more important part which is not mentioned is that opportunity is in large part the result of hard work. A child makes her own opportunities by intelligence, passion and effort.
> "A child’s inputs and external forces" is a funny name to call their parents and teachers.
I used that phrase specifically because a person has far more influences in their life than just their parents or teachers. The things that limit or expand a person’s choices are far more than just teachers or family life. Are parents and teacher influences important? Sure. But they are absolutely not the only influences. And neither of those are what I mean when I say external forces.
I’m not sure I have a lot of disagreement with most of the other things you say. Of course a person should make their own opportunities from hard work, passion, and effort.
However (to tie this to the comment I initially replied to) if equality of opportunity is the goal, then we need to make sure we reward actual hard work, not only family multipliers. It’s not like we have to look far to see how many lazy rich kids have countless opportunities and how many hard working poor people struggle yet are incredibly limited in their choices.
Maximizing individual agency means we give everyone who wants to pursue an educational field or career a fair shot at it regardless of who their family is or regardless of what sex they’re born as or their race or whatever. Do they have to work hard? Of course.
Should a lazy rich kid whose family “…spend more time, money and effort to boost the education of their children…” have more opportunities because of “family merit” than the poor kid who worked their ass off and did well? Absolutely not. And the reverse is true as well.
We should be maximizing individual agency and maximizing individual choice and neither of those means we have to abandon hard work. But it does mean we have to knock down arbitrary barriers.
Equal opportunity would mean there would be a roughly 50/50 split. Unless one subscribes to some notion that biology would make women desire the positions (politics, management, ...) less.
Which didn't stop men to dominate all positions of power for centuries. Women weren't even allowed to vote, something that changed very recently in some countries (looking at you, Swiss). So yeah, equality here means to have the same right to he overspreading that men have.
Its not the first female majority parliament in the world, its the first female majority parliament in europe.
Right now, there are five countries where there is a female majority: Rwanda(61%), Cuba(53%), Nicaragua(51%), Mexico(50%) and United Arabian Emirates(50%).
Cuba is an undemocratic authoritarian one-party state where elections are not free and no opposition is permitted - but hey, they have women in parliament so let's celebrate them?
It is the opposite, gender equality needs to have been achieved decades ago to get equal gender ratios in leadership positions since it takes so long to build a career and rise to the top. What we see today mirrors the social dynamics that existed in the 80's. What we will see in the coming decades will be the social dynamics of the 90's, then 00's to the 10's etc.
“ The 33 women elected to Alþingi for the coming four years amount to 52 percent of members, making Iceland the first country in Europe to have a female majority in parliament. Five other countries in the world share this accolade: Rwanda (61 percent), Cuba (53 percent), Nicaragua (51 percent), and Mexico and the United Arab Emirates (50 percent).”
https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/26/katrin-to-lead-female-ma...
I always found it hard to understand what are the ultimate generic principles that drive people with the attitude that you demonstrate (which is even more surprising given that so many people around me also do that).
Why should the percentage of women in parliament be related in any way to their percentage in the population? Why don't we apply the same reasoning to all the other properties which can be used to divide people into groups (e.g. right- vs. left-handed people, gamers vs. book readers, engineers vs. lawyers, meat-eaters vs. vegans). When there's literally an infinity of possibilities, what makes women vs. men so special?
Why does your notion of representation require sharing traits with the elected person? If I took part in the elections (and I believe they were honest and not rigged in any way) then the person who wins represents me in the sense that this person is now legally authorized to make the decisions (limited by the laws) on my behalf.
As some others noted here, since women voted on elections before, how can one claim the elected people did not represent them?
You seem to be having a different idea of representation. What is it and why should it matter? This is an honest question, not trolling or anything.
A different way to look at this question is to ask why do certain roles have lopsided gender distributions. For, e.g. nursing, it can be explained by gender preferences towards human care roles.
For leadership, there's elephant-in-the-room factors that explains higher rates of male leaders, i.e. perception of competence in patriarchal societies, the relationship between boys clubs and wealth as prerequisite for successful political campaigning, etc.
If we were to control for these factors, we should be able to see representation rates that are 50/50 (or at least rates that are explainable by "morally acceptable" factors, e.g. rate of interest by gender)
That's as realistic as all men voting for a all-female parliament. The point is that realistically, given a spectrum of political stances, a purely meritocratic system would statistically be more likely to yield a distribution with similar representation rates as the base population rather than a lopsided distribution.
Unequal representation doesn't automatically imply something non-meritocratic is happening.
There could be self-selection due to preferences, which explains why almost all nurses are women and why almost all garbage truck drivers are men. There could also be selection based on differences in behavior or competence: almost all prisoners are men because almost all of the most aggressive people in society are men. The justice system isn't sexist, the lopsided gender balance is a consequence of group-level differences in criminality due to genes and culture.
In the case of societal leadership, sexism has clearly played a role in shaping representation historically, but that conclusion definitely doesn't follow from the mere observation of unequal distribution, it follows from an understanding of the details of why that distribution is lopsided.
Nah, you're projecting a black-and-white world view. Statistically speaking, some men would vote for men, some would vote for women, some women would vote for men and some would vote for women, and overall it would average out to around half and half representation.
To be clear, it's not bad for an all-men or all-women parliament to exist in a high functioning democracy. It's statistically possible, just highly unlikely. If we look at a large timescale and there's a lopsided distribution the majority of time, or highly lopsided spikes for short periods of time, that sugggests that there are confounding factors that don't align with democratic idealism.
Surely - if this is your goal - then its better to focus on encouraging a 50:50 representative choice of candidates and humbly accept whoever the men and women then chose to represent them?
You may just get a large group of competent women who are very popular to all. I can't see why it would be better for as you say - democratic idealism - to then decry that some incompetent men candidates didn't get the gig.
Sure, in theory that could happen, but then you'd be able to explain the lopsidedness somehow. For, e.g. professions like nursing, the lopsidedness can be satisfactorily explained by gender preferences wrt roles related to human care.
The elephant in the room with regards to leadership is all the stuff related to perception of competence in patriarchal societies, boys clubs (recall that in many places, wealth is somewhat of a prerequisite for campaigning successfully), etc.
No. Women generally prefer male politicians. This suggests that sex matters. Men are traditionally heads of their households in virtually every society in history. The monarchy is an extension of the notion of fatherhood, hence the patriarchy. This is a natural role for men, and women generally sense this subconsciously. You need something potent to get women to work against this perception. Father wounds and the ideologies of resentment that exploit them are good bet.
If men and women were identical, then you should expect matriarchies to account for half of all societies. But you don’t which means a difference must exist, and clearly a meaningful one. The notion that there is some adversarial misogyny behind patriarchy is preposterous. God bless the patriarchy!
You don't think that bring physically stronger has any role in this on a historical basis? That it's just due to some vague "masculine nature" that women "subconsciously sense?"
It's fine to point out problems with specific comments but your claims about "prevalance" and "dominance" are incorrect. They're far from prevalent or dominant, and it's a cognitive bias which causes people to arrive at such conclusions: they/you/all of us drastically over-weight the comments we dislike, which leads to false feelings of generality ("prevalence").
The truth is that HN gets all sorts of comments because it's an open public forum. It's divided in the same way that the public at large is divided—all over the world, because this is a highly international site. We can't expect immunity from bad or extreme comments under such conditions. All we can hope for is that most of those get downvoted, flagged, or otherwise moderated—which is precisely what happened to the comment you were reacting to upthread.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Feel free to browse the comments, particularly the fine fellow trying to convince us all that women were never actually that oppressed to begin with, and then tell me if you think the tone on here is being fair to women.
If you read the article, women make up 33 of the 63 seats. That's ~52%, which is well within the margin of error for a country that is ~50% women. Looking at the binomial probability, we would expect this number of women (or more) ~40% of the time. I'd say that this is statistically pretty close to equality.
I'd look at "equality" as a statistical measure over time. If the imbalance is less than 10% in each parliament, and the frequency of male- and female-majority parliaments (say, over the last century) is similarly balanced, I'd call that pretty darn equal. Thus far, Iceland has only elected a single female-majority parliament in its entire history, so I'd agree with your implication that equality has not been achieved. I'd also agree with the article, that this is a landmark.
Right now it's 52% female so I'm willing to let it slide even though it's not exactly 50%. That said, I'm skeptical that a pro-male representation camp will materialize even if it hits 60 or 70%. See: gender gap in college attendance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836
In a society without a history of male dominance over women, having a legislative body with more women than men would be commonplace or at least unremarkable. In virtually all societies through all of history, this has not been the case. So the fact that such a thing has now occurred is an indicator of reduced male dominance, something we should all be happy about.
Participation in politics has been on the rise ever since, it has never yet equalized. We have data to show that interest is greater than participation, and documented history that explains why.
At the time of women was allowed to vote in Sweden, only 10% of men was allowed to vote.
One of the forgotten events caused by the early 1900 was the separation of military service with voting rights. Until then a fulfilled military service to ones country was a common condition for voting. Many restrictions on voting was removed during those early decades, including many that prevented many women from voting after the women's suffrage. Conditions like having paid taxes for a set amount of previous years, not having social support, and so on.
A Wikipedia article is not a good answer to most things, they're usually single takes and generally aren't broad enough in focus. Wikipedia is a good jump off point for subjects you generally don't know anything about, but that's really it.
Take the article you linked; while it does show example of how women were repressed in the past, it doesn't go that far into why they were repressed and how men were also repressed at the time. As someone what likes to read up on medieval European history, there's just so much more to it.
I understand the appeal of Wikipedia, but it should really not be treated as anything but an opinion piece that requires further research and reading. While you can read some good articles, they are few and far between (and often only show one viewpoint).
Absolutely, the whole intent of my link was to be a starting point for the curious. I don’t see any reason not to prefer a small starting point like a Wikipedia article on Women’s Suffrage, which seems like a nice clear and factual demonstration of the problems with @vimy’s assumptions, especially in a heated controversial topic on HN. If I came on strong and tried to dump something complete - well ignoring that there’s no such thing on this topic, I’d expect it to cause argument, get downvoted, or be ignored. Anyway, by all means if you have a better example, I’d welcome it. If @vimy is serious about their question, and curious whether women want political careers, and whether gender preferences have settled, then a good starting point is recent history. The web page I linked shows that Vice President Kamala Harris was born before black women were allowed to vote everywhere in the U.S. That’s remarkable and relevant to the question they raised, it’s surprising how recently women were allowed to be political, and surprising how quickly things have changed.
I think you misinterpreted what I said. I never said women weren't held back. Only that there could be a different reason for the lack of women in politics.
Are you sure I misinterpreted? Your restated position sounds the same as what I heard above, the message seems the same, and my reaction is the same: that maybe you don’t really know any history and don’t understand how recently women were not allowed to participate in politics. What makes you think there could a different reason, when there are women still alive today who weren’t allowed to vote, let alone seek office in their lifetimes? The only reason to suggest there’s a different reason is to try to downplay bias, to resist acknowledging the truth that society did hold women back, and that we haven’t yet recovered from that. You’re suggesting an unspecified alternative to what we already know is the reason, because it was documented.
The number of women in politics is increasing today, right now. (The article is only one of many examples.) The number has gone up multiples during your lifetime. So it’s very clear that you can’t claim the numbers are the way they are because of some “different reason”. The number of women interested in politics (and business, and medicine, and engineering…) are still growing and responding to the recent decision to stop discriminating. We can’t make conclusions about any other reasons until the distribution of women in politics settles, for a long time, and in many countries. Right now, that’s not the case, right now more and more women are seeking political careers.
Yes, 50 years, even 100 years, is very recent in social cultural terms - they are within the lifetime of a single person, which is shorter than it takes for some attitudes to change. What do you mean by warped and black and white? Please elaborate. Just like your comments above, this is vague and unspecific and unconstructive. I think laws preventing women from voting was pretty black and white, so what nuance am I missing, exactly? Were you really wondering whether women want to have political careers, or do you hope not? Are you upset by the fact that increasing numbers of women are becoming career politicians?
What other explanations do you have in mind? What “different reasons” are there? Do the reasons you have in mind account for the fact that female representation is growing year over year?
I don’t think you’re a misogynist, I wasn’t talking about you. But you are providing multiple comments’ evidence that you may lack historical background and might lack the will to think critically and self-reflect about your own learned assumptions and where you got them, that you might have been trying to make a rhetorical point and aren’t interested in a discussion or in the real answer to the very question you asked - whether women are interested in politics. Answer: they are increasingly. The idea that there are “different reasons” and other explanations besides social bias has historically been a talking point for people who don’t want to either accept or admit that cultural sexism still exists, that’s the undercurrent of your comments even if it’s unintentional on your part. Casting vague criticisms toward me doesn’t change the provenance of the ideas you’ve adopted and shared here. The very idea that there are “different reasons” was suggesting that the discrepancy between male and female representation could be at some kind of natural balance, right? I mean you stated it explicitly, that preferences might explain today’s balance. But it’s not in balance now, and never has been, that’s a fact we know for certain.
The data we have - from the fact that there were basically zero women with political careers as little as 100 years ago, to the fact that the number of women in politics has been and continues to steadily increase - the things I’m pointing out pertain to the question of whether there are any other relevant explanations that matter right now.
I’m not claiming that there are no sex/gender differences, nor that the numbers should be exactly 50/50. What I’m saying is that the fact that women were (and still are) held back by society obviously shadows all other reasons to this day. We can’t begin to ask whether there are other reasons until we’ve ruled out cultural bias, and we have tons and tons of ongoing data that proves beyond any shadow of doubt that we have not yet fixed cultural bias.
Suppose there were additional reasons reasons for today’s gender discrepancy in politics (and I’m sure there are some, like pregnancy). If the reason changed the distribution by 0.1%, would you say that it’s relevant and worth talking about? How would we actually measure it? In terms of what we should do as a society, how would it inform our opinions and policies?
At the top of the thread, you asked unironically “what if women are just less interested in politics?” My question to you is: what if interest in politics is primarily determined by cultural biases? What if women thirty years ago said they were less interested in politics precisely because they knew it was a terribly sexist environment? What if that’s still the case to some degree? How would you actually determine which preferences are determined by sex or gender, and which preferences are the result of ongoing discrimination?
> In a society without a history of male dominance over women, having a legislative body with more women than men would be commonplace or at least unremarkable. In virtually all societies through all of history, this has not been the case. So the fact that such a thing has now occurred is an indicator of reduced male dominance, something we should all be happy about.
You can only come to a conclusion like that through an ignorance of history, or willful ignorance of societies where females exercised power. Although, I would separate matriarchies from matrilineal societies, and also, societies in which women exerted a great deal of power through soft means.
For example, a list of pure matriarchies
Ancient Amazons
Iroquois Confederacy
The Mosuo people
The Hopi people
Some Celtic tribes
A list of kingdoms with female rulers of note:
England, during some of its most important years [1]
A list of Queens Regnant which includes ancient Egypt, Rome, and many, many others [2]
Additionally, this would also include periods of Queen Regency too [3]
Just to name a few
A list of Matrilineal societies:
Jews
Sparta
Scotland
Much of Africa
If we remember many monarchies, autocracies, and other forms of government had powerful women (Queen Consorts) that provided input into decisions being made. Modern day lobbyists have nothing on a queen that is sleeping with the king.
However, when you think about actual legislative bodies, in a democratic sense, that greatly reduces the numbers you can use throughout history.
When we think about wide spread democracy, it is actually a fairly recent invention, and normally came with some very specific rules around property ownership, power/wealth, etc.
If you are arguing that woman have had more power or roughly equal power in most societies, you are absolutely wrong. You listed exceptions, as in exceptions to the rule, the rule being male dominance in human societies. And all of those exceptions come with a truckload or two of caveats.
> If you are arguing that woman have had more power or roughly equal power in most societies, you are absolutely wrong.
I would argue different power.
In warlike times (much of more antique history, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam) many of the powerful men were at home with the gear, while ordinary men were conscripted and dying/maimed on battlefields.
There has always been a pecking order of the powerful above the ordinary plebes, and powerful women have always been a part of the Optimati.
> You listed exceptions, as in exceptions to the rule, the rule being male dominance in human societies. And all of those exceptions come with a truckload or two of caveats.
I think there are more than a few exceptions, and you are dismissing them out of hand.
Just think about it - England, during its Golden Age, the most powerful kingdom in the West, was under a female monarch, during which time the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Spanish Armadas occured I would presume that is one prominent reason why English has become the Lingua Franca.
When people think of Egyptian Pharaohs, many would immediately think of Cleopatra, or Ramses II.
Russian history would be lost without an Empress Catherine.
Who was the Queen that authorized/sponsored Christopher Columbus on his Journey West, Isabella perhaps?
And, there is a much bigger list of important monarchs [1] of which only a few are noted.
> " In virtually all societies through all of history, this has not been the case."
While it's true that in some societies some women were in position power, it does not mean that woman as a class eschewed domination.
IIRC in the Iroquois confederation, women were organized as one of society's pole, the economic domestic one, and had power in times of war because war needs the collaboration of the whole society. It is also hard to say if that they had always had that power or gained it during war times. In any case, they were/are statistically rare.
Also although many societies are matrilineal it does not means that the society is not male dominated.
It is a sad conclusion of anthropology that the, often times ruthless, domination of women by men has been for a long time a constant of human history.
> While it's true that in some societies some women were in position power, it does not mean that woman as a class eschewed domination. IIRC in the Iroquois confederation, women were organized as one of society's pole, the economic domestic one, and had power in times of war because war needs the collaboration of the whole society. It is also hard to say if that they had always had that power or gained it during war times. In any case, they were/are statistically rare.
That is not correct.
> When the 5 nations needed to make a critical decision, such as going to war, they would decide via the Grand Council. Representatives of each clan called Sachems conducted the council meetings themselves.
> The Sachems were voted to their political positions by their designated Clan Mothers, the matrilineal hereditary leaders of their nations, and were perceived by the Haudenosaunee as sacred leaders. Women were seen as almost divine beings, albeit for practical reasons that aided their society’s survival.....
> Although the chiefs held most of the political power and day to day governance, the Clan Mother possessed the power to dismiss the chief if she and other Mothers felt he was doing a poor job.
> Chiefs handled civic matters, others took care of military operations, and Sachems acted as a Congress to vote on decisions for the Confederacy at the councils. Making the chiefs and sachems more akin to elected officials and not the monarchal leaders we often associate with today in indigenous culture. [1]
This shows that the role of the clan mothers was more similar to a permanent parliament that could form local executives (chiefs), dismiss them at will, and controlled the decision-making for the confederation by selecting representative decisionmakers for the grand council.
This has some similarities to the Italian style parliament, with permanent members dominating the government.
Yes, and that was mostly due to biological factors combined with societal needs and the general repression of all genders outside of places of power.
E.g. why were female knights not common? Because knights were given land and in return were expected to answer their lord's summons. A woman that is pregnant cannot answer the summons and must send a delegate to lead her men. I hope I don't need to explain to you the drama and turmoil a no-show like that might lead to, both in military and political terms. Instead, the wives were (usually) the second in commands, and lorded over the lands in the absence of their husbands.
Matrilineality has a great amount of power assocation/inheritance, since it if the men die off, and inheritance goes to a wife, there is little disincentive for war from a female perspective, and, potential more incentive. Imagine a warlike society with a divorce court where you know you will get 100%. If women control the assets, and inheritance flows through them, that is a great deal of power.
Furthermore, the ability to raise the future ruler is also the ability to influence that future rule, and comes with it frequently regency.
The idea of a powerless female nobility I do not find to be compatible with history.
There's a theory that social aggreggation is driven by the behavior of males (who tend to socialize in large, shallow groups) rather than women (who tend to socialize 1-1)
In 1994 the leading Swedish party the Social Democrats made it their policy to have women on every other electable position. This policy obviously increased the number of female candidates the party fielded but, according to research, also increased the average competence level of the candidates. Contrary to common(?) wisdom, the competence of female candidates that took positions from male candidates were generally equal to or higher than the men that they replaced. Thus the fear that gender quotas that favor women in politics will decrease competence seem unfounded as it is contradicted by research. Furthermore, the research may also indicate that men has some inherent trait unrelated to their competence that gives them an advantage over women. Parties generally select their candidates through competitions and, on the local level, they often amount to nothing more than popularity contests... This process may be inherently biased against women.
The research is here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20160080 I'm sure anyone who frequents HN is able to find and read the full article online. Feel free to read it before criticizing. :) The authors define competence as a combination of educational attainment with income level compared to the mean. So it's a very crude metric, but similar metrics have been used to measure competence in other contexts.
The abstract doesn't say what you're saying. It says that the competence of men increased on average because the worst men got kicked out. Which is obviously what's going to happen. If you take a class of people and remove the bottom half, the average of the remaining people will necessarily be improved.
No, the study doesn't even compare men and women. It compares men to men and women to women. It doesn't say anything at all about the competence of the newly added women compared to the competence of the kicked out men, since it has no absolute values of competence in the study. It just has deltas for men and deltas for women, so you can't compare.
So all we learned is that reducing the amount of positions available to men will kick out the less competent men first. We didn't learn whether the total competence of the group got increased after gender quotas compared to before.
You are absolutely right. It's not clear from the abstract whether there is a buried absolute comparison. The idea that the average of the group as a whole is raised seems so obvious I didn't even consider a reality where less competent men were replace by even less competent women.
Edit (oh look a full text article, I didn't expect to see a link so I assumed it was just an abstract link).
What it does say at least is that while the quota removed a fraction of men that turned out to be less competent than those that were removed, thereby improving the average competence of the remaining group of men, the added group of women did not have lower competence than the existing group (which would perhaps have been expected).
For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification
without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case,
however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota
neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of
the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women
through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among
women.
Since men and women aren't compared in absolute terms, this doesn't mean there was an increase in competence either. But it does say that it wasn't a replacement of the group of low competence men (compared to their peers) with a group of low competence women (compared to their female peers). So that does suggest something (which the article does note), for example that the pool of competent women could be larger.
I'm a little confused by the conventions of this article (this isn't my field), but I think Table 4 on page 2226 and Figure 4 on page 2228 (and the surrounding text) are in fact looking at the total competence of the group before and after gender quotas.
The reason it is so strange is that it has different data for the men and women, they used among other things the military intelligence test which only men takes and income to measure competence. Income is definitely not a fair competence measure between men and women so you can't use that either, so it makes sense that they didn't compare competence directly.
So I am pretty sure that graph assumed that men and women had the same competence before, as the measures they had weren't comparable at all between the groups.
Given time and resources, that group of women will gain experience to be as performant as the group of men who have had centuries to learn how to do politics. Should that mean we need to allow underperforming persons in government? No - but it does mean being aware of the metric we are using. Great insight on this here:
should be fairly obvious. There's no reason to assume the competence to govern differs significantly between the sexes (by definition a good democracy is representative), the fact that in many countries women constitute less than 20%-30% of representatives is obviously going to lower the performance of government.
Same observation could be made about age. If you installed a quota tomorrow to make government representative on that metric you'd eliminate a huge number of quasi zombies from power.
I know that quotas are a good idea for some people, but I believe the result would be absolute horrible. I though we would be wiser than this by now...
Conservatives are somehow more successful to bring women into politics than the "liberal" approach.
