Where are the women?

Elections week has come to an end here in St Andrews and the unavoidable campaigning around town and all over multiple forms of social media is finally finished. Whether it was bombardment in the form of innumerable flyers or stickers outside the library, or yet another invitation to ‘like’ this Facebook page for one candidate running for AU president, or to ‘attend’ that event for electing another as DoRep, it was sometimes moderately irritating. Either way this was a time for all students to get involved.

This year’s elections put forward just three candidates for the position of Student Association president. Something noteworthy beyond the scarcity is that they were all male. I would like to have no qualm with this. However, when considering this lack coupled with the fact that Chloe Hill is only the fifth female President St Andrews has seen in fifty years, concerns start to surface.

Taking this to a more international stage, the question is: why are there so few women in politics? It’s 2014 and the US is yet to have a female President, (Hillary here’s looking at you) and the UK has only seen one woman lead our nation. Studying the rankings of women in parliamentary bodies worldwide, Great Britain finds themselves in 59^th position, with just 22.6% of women comprising their Parliament. Compare this to the United States, which comes in at #80, with just 20% of females in the senate. We are both beaten hands down by nations such as Iraq, El Salvador and Afghanistan. However, pecking order aside, there is evidently a severe lack of diversity and representation all over the world.

Males outnumber females 4 to 1 in Westminster and only 4 out of 23 cabinet minsters are women. Women make up 21.7% of the House of Lords which retains a systematic bias against them: none of the 26 bishops are, or can be, women, and only two of the 92 hereditary peers are women.

In her 2011 documentary Miss Representation, which explores the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America, Jennifer Newsom illustrates how women are discouraged from a young age to take leadership roles. When she was pregnant with her son, people said her boy could be their nation’s leader. She was never told the same when expecting her daughter. A recent survey by ABC News-Fusion showed that only 43% of Americans believed that it would be a beneficial thing if more women were elected to be President. It is quite clear that attitudes have to change.

We should be encouraging and supporting more females to run for any kind of position in St Andrews. It is, of course, about electing the best candidate, whatever their gender. But perhaps when this period rolls around in 2015 we can rally behind the girls we know who would be great in the position but, for whatever reason, are hesitant to campaign. You never know where it might lead.