Editorial | Name independents to Senate - Make it easier for female MPs

THERE IS a matter which Dr Peter Phillips undertook to do something about if his party had won last week’s election, which should be followed through by Prime Minister Andrew Holness – implementing programmes and policies to make it easier for women to be involved in representational politics. This would include making the legislative chambers an easier place for women to work.

Despite his pending resignation as president because of the People’s National Party’s trouncing at the polls, Dr Phillips should honour his commitment, confirmed during the leaders’ debate ahead of the election, by naming women to at least half of the eight Senate appointments he is allowed to make as leader of the Opposition. Dr Phillips’ successor, if there is a change in policy under his or her leadership, could attempt to entice the Senate appointees to resign, to which they would not be obliged to yield.

Further, given his big legislative majority in Parliament – at least 48 of the 63-member House – Mr Holness should emulate the decision of what P.J. Patterson did in 1998 and name at least two independent members among the 13 persons he has to appoint to the Senate. This would help to bring diversity to the debates of the Upper House, which has all but lost its character as a deliberative chamber. Most Senate debates, and votes, in recent years, are mostly along sterile partisan lines.

IMPACT

While well-chosen independent senators would impact, for the better, the tone and substance of the discourse in the chamber, it would not affect the Government’s majority in the Senate and, therefore, its ability to pass regular bills.

The legislative effect would be in circumstances where the Government needs a two-thirds majority to pass laws, in which case it might be required to persuade two persons, rather than one, who are not under the party’s whip, to vote with the Government.

While women make up nearly 51 per cent of Jamaica’s population, they are significantly under-represented in elective politics, although their numbers have recently increased. The new Parliament, for example, will have a historically high number of women members of parliament – 18, or 29 per cent of the House members. There were 11 women – approximately seventeen and a half per cent – in the previous Parliament. Seventy-seven per cent of the new cohort of female MPs will represent the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

The higher JLP number is not only because it did better in the election. It also fielded more female candidates – 18, which was 29 per cent of all its candidates, which was a third more than the People's National Party (PNP). Mr Holness said in the debate that this was the result of a deliberate programme of recruitment by his party.

According to Dr Phillips, the PNP believed that at least half its members in the House and the Senate should be women. He, however, argued that achieving that ideal would require support mechanisms beyond his party’s declared commitment to it.

“ We ... need to understand that there are many factors that impede women’s participation,” he said. “The support for childcare, for example, in the House and Senate, generally (is) one such factor … . The fact that women carry the greater share of household work is also another factor.”

STRONG BACKLASH

Dr Phillips, surprisingly, received a strong backlash on social media for these observations, supposedly for consigning women, including many high achievers, to household work. The factors, though, have long been highlighted among impediments, in Jamaica and globally, to the greater participation of women in the time-consuming business of representational politics. Or, put differently, the tension between the roles women generally assume as primary caregivers and managers of family life and the demands of constituents.

There was, for instance, the case last year of the Kenyan lawmaker, Zuleika Hassan, who was thrown out of that country’s Parliament for taking her baby to the legislature. Similarly, a female Danish MP, Mette Abildgaard, was ordered by the Speaker to leave the chamber with her baby.

These, and more, are not isolated incidents for legislators, who, like millions of working mothers around the world, often have problems with day-care services and struggle to balance the demands of family with employment. This is despite the viral 2018 images of Canadian MP Karina Gold breastfeeding her baby in Parliament, or that last year of New Zealand’s House Speaker Trevor Millard cradling member Tamati Coffey’s infant in the Speaker’s chair.

Some Parliaments clearly have arrangements to support female MPs and other staff. Most, including Jamaica’s, do not.

It will take more than crèches and children’s play facilities, such as exist in New Zealand, to entice more women into this often rough-and-tumble avocation. But they help. Mr Holness, though, is in a unique position to take concrete policy action that would push things along, as well as influence a broader conversation towards change.