And so it has finally happened.  Thanks to President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca the urgency of action to ensure parliamentary gender parity has been pushed on to the national agenda.   Kudos to the President.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, the President has come out urging the two main political parties to ensure that through positive action on this long- standing matter, the issue is addressed in the next legislature. Thank you President for standing up to be counted with the rest of us.

I have tirelessly spoken and written about the need to address this imbalance to ensure that female representation is strengthened in Parliament. Despite the arguments in favour of this healthy balance, it seems that a fast change in attitude may be required before the political parties can come together with concrete proposals for readdress. Unfortunately, whenever the issue of quotas is raised this is seemingly perceived as a measure for women to taken men’s places rather than as a positive step to ensure parity and equity.

Others view this as tokenism showing that they fail to understand the real reason why such temporary measures may be necessary to address the imbalance.

From personal experience I can vouch for this mentality. The first time I contested an internal election for the executive committee of the Nationalist Party I was elected on what was then known as the ‘pink quota’. This was a quota fought hard and long by female protagonists before me to ensure female participation in the PN party structures. I will never forget the unfair comments of having taken a male’s place.

Can we afford to wait another 70 years in an effort to increase female participation?

This is simply unacceptable and is an attitude that hinders young female leaders from hoping to join political forces.

Since then the PN has put this issue high on its agenda with party leader Simon Busuttil going as far as to change the party statute to include two separate ballot lists for the very same election for the party executive. Love or hate quotas, their end result will give us the results we seek.

As the President has pointed out in her opinion in this paper (April 4), 70 years since the introduction of universal suffrage in this country and female representation in the Maltese Parliament still stands at only 13 per cent. In recent days, Kenya’s High Court has ruled that one-third of MPs must be women. Malta as a modern, democratic, EU member state deserves to have more female leaders aspiring to serve.

Waiting for the natural thing to happen with our current parliamentary system has clearly not been enough and it will be up to the political parties to agree on an acceptable way forward to accelerate this process, albeit temporarily.

Can we afford to wait another 70 years in an effort to increase female participation?

I back the President’s call to the party leaders to seek consensus on this issue and find ways of ensuring that the next electoral process includes ways of improving the chances of election of female candidates as one of measures necessary to address this shortcoming in our society.

Achieving consensus on the methods to be adopted will send out the right message, especially to the younger generations, that the highest policymakers are committed to address this failing with positive action.

In this very same paper (March 8), I had written that despite promising us a feminist government, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat failed abysmally in this regard.   Failing to recognise the importance of true gender parity is having an invisible backlash on our society.

The gender gap in Malta has widened at an alarming rate and swift and tough decisions are in order to create an environment attractive enough to attract women to public and political life.

Caroline Galea is a member of the PN executive committee and a general election candidate on the fourth district.

info@carolinegalea.com

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