While Canada may be a leader in the promotion of gender equality, one area in which we seriously lack is the severe under-representation of women in elected positions. In the most recent federal election, eighty-eight female MP’s (Members of Parliament) were elected, but that is only 26% of the total which ranks Canada 49th in the world in terms of percentage of women in parliament – just behind Kazakstan. Even in our own province, in 2015, Alberta only elected twenty-seven women out of its eight-seven total legislative members.
It may be unfortunate, but the reality is that women in political positions are still harassed much more than their male counterparts. Some recent examples include Alberta Health Minister, Sarah Hofmann being questioned about her wight by a senior government leader and a knife-twisting gesture being made behind the back of City Councillor Druh Farrell during a meeting.
Furthermore, the busy lifestyle, long hours, and and late meetings that being in public office involves are very unfavourable to women who have the primary responsibility of raising families. It is fundamental that we revise some of these barriers to create a more enabling environment for females to get involved in politics.
One initiative which has done this, is the Ask Her YYC Campaign in the 2017 Calgary Municipal Election which set out to support women in running their election campaigns. They succeeded in getting twenty one female candidates to file their nomination papers and one more female elected to City Council. Proving, that we are moving in the right direction, but there is still quite a ways to go.
As the famous saying goes – women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights. Canadians need to work together to fight this long road towards creating governments where all segments of our population are adequately represented.