Flushed by the inroads it has made in pushing ahead with the granting of further equality rights, the Labour government is now thinking of encouraging more women to play a role in the country’s decision-making process.
This is all to the good and ought to be further encouraged, however, in trying to strike a balance in terms of representation in Parliament, care must be taken not to go to extremes. Hopefully, the government would, this time, adopt a more sensible approach than it did when it rushed through the same-sex marriage law.
This will ensure that the final approach agreed upon to encourage greater female representation is not only acceptable to as wide a section of the population as possible but, also, that it is the most effective way of boosting women’s empowerment.
Women’s participation in community affairs have come a long way in recent times as, with greater childcare facilities provided by the State and other incentives, more and more are taking up work outside their homes. There are also more women in the judicature and the boardrooms of private commercial companies today than ever before.
However, the number of women in politics is still very small, a matter that the founder of this newspaper, Mabel Strickland, would have also found greatly unacceptable. A long-time champion of women’s rights, Miss Strickland knew first-hand the difficulties women found in their way for advancement or for greater participation in the country’s life.
When, for example, she attended the second sitting of a national assembly called in 1945 to draft a new Constitution, one delegate objected because, he argued, it could be taken as meaning that women had the right to vote in general elections. Headway was made in the third session when the assembly gave the thumbs up to the Women of Malta Association, a move generally taken as acceptance of the principle of equal rights for women in the island’s political life, including the right to vote in parliamentary elections.
A motion for the extension of the electoral franchise to women was confirmed in the fourth session but it was not until 1947 that it was made law.
Women have always been greatly underrepresented in Parliament but now Labour is planning to start redressing the imbalance. It hopes to do so over a 10-year period and is making the first move by introducing party quotas. The plan is for the party to raise the number of women candidates to half the total contesting an election by 2027. The quota set for the coming European elections is 40 per cent; that for local councils, 35 per cent and for the next general elections, 35 per cent.
Labour leader Joseph Muscat said the party had a strong electoral mandate to introduce quotas and he is hoping the plan will kick-start a national debate. There are various types of gender quota systems but perhaps the most preferable are voluntary party quotas. The least attractive is that which reserves seats for women.
Rather than imposing quotas legally, it would be best to try and bring about – over time and through voluntary measures – a culture change, one that makes women take part in politics as a matter of course rather than through any rigid regulatory framework.