This week during drama class at school my daughter and her classmates had to sit down and draw plans for a robot. No technological limits and no expenses spared.

“We came up with this robot which can do all the chores! Cooking, housework, fix the car when it stops working, help with kids’ homework, give advice, take children to ballet, walk the dogs, everything,” she said to me the minute she came home.

“Hmm. It would be great to have one like that,” I said.

Their planned price tag however was a bit hefty I thought: €900,000.

“So would you buy it?”

“I’d certainly love to, but I’m afraid I can’t afford it.”

“That’s a pity, it would be nice to have Mumbot around.”

“Mumbot?”

“Yes that’s what we called it because we thought it does all the jobs that mummies do.”

Oh.

Now, let me just say that my daughter lives in a household which actively upholds equality and gender task-sharing. But of course because I am the one with the shortest working hours she mostly sees me doing the errand-running. We are not alone, according to statistics. A 2015 report reveals that one of the most serious challenges for gender equality in Malta is the unequal division of time spent by women and men on unpaid work, and the gap is getting worse and worse over time.

Which brings me to my point today: the Prime Minister announced this week that gender quotas are definitely to be introduced. However, I really think it’s important that we dig deeper before we bandy about this as a solution. We cannot deal with the problem of female representation by a quota system alone: we need to treat the cause and not the symptom.

Ours is society where traditional roles still abound. For example, when men are approached to be candidates for members of parliament, their wives or partners are usually very supportive. The same cannot be said when women are encouraged to contest. Husbands are usually – to put it mildly – unkeen. Clearly we need a culture change. But of course it’s a vicious circle and one of the factors that will bring that about is having more women in parliament.

Okay, maybe we can have a Dambot or a Mudpot. A Mum-Dad combination. Now, that sounds good and I can’t wait for it to be on sale

So, yes, quotas need to be discussed. But properly. So far the discussion points consisted of rudimentary for or against: “Yes, I’m in favour” or “Noo, I can’t stand quotas, they are demeaning to women”.

Why don’t we take a step back and see exactly what we mean by word ‘quotas’. In people’s mind there seems to be just one form of quota: reserved seats quotas, which means upseating elected men to make space for women with lesser votes.

Urgh. Not neat at all. It makes the men incumbents who are dismissed feel resentful; and the women less confident, because of the niggling feeling that they never really deserved to be there.

But quotas are not just that. I am a firm advocate of the so-called ‘Zebra’ quotas, which would work perfectly with our Single Transferable Vote electoral system. This would require the party candidate lists to alternate between one male and one female candidate. In a district list which might have just two women on the ballot sheet, and one has the surname of Zammit and the other Vella, there is not much chance of election, but a Zebra system would give them a better chance.

This system has been particularly effective in Sweden. But not on its own: firstly, the five political parties in the country adopted voluntary party quotas and had an equal number of candidates on their sheets; secondly they adopted the Zebra method on the ballot sheet.  The combination of these two things resulted in a consistently high proportion of women elected to parliament over the past 15 years.

But in in meantime we all need to pull the same rope for the gradual process of change of culture. We must systematically promote women’s participation in all strata of society: political parties, the educational system, NGOs, trade unions, churches. Women’s groups need to shake themselves up: they need to mobilise and organise pressure to ensure that political parties increase their number of women candidates. This will lay the groundwork to facilitate women’s entry into politics. Then we need to see how to help them juggling job, family and political activity; a significant issue for women more than men.

“So can we have a Dadpot?” I asked my daughter

After a series of whispers with her friend she said: “Okay, maybe we can have a Dambot or a Mudpot.”

A Mum-Dad combination. Now, that sounds good and I can’t wait for it to be on sale.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti

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