Your Union and its women leaders

Today seems like the right day to talk about women in leadership. In the past several years we have seen the ranks of women leaders, in both political and professional spheres, grow. At present Hilary Clinton is the most anticipated candidate for the US Presidency, Angela Merkel serves as the first woman chancellor of Germany, and Malala Yousfazi took the world by storm with her uncompromising stance on women’s rights. Yet, as we watch our society become more equal, women as a whole are still underrepresented in leadership roles. Britain has had only one woman prime minister and the United States has not yet had a woman president (though that may soon change). It seems then that we should look close to home and see how our little bubble stacks up against the world when it comes to electing women leaders. To do this, I’ve decided to look at our beloved Students’ Association.

St Andrews has only ever had one woman Rector. 156 years after instituting the office of Rector, and 120 years after admitting women to study, the student body has only ever sent one woman to the highest office it can. This past year there were eleven sabbatical candidates for Association positions (the AU president race is slightly different and thus not included) and only two of them were women. Compounding that, every candidate for the presidency was a man. This from a student body that is 58% women. On the surface these numbers seem depressing. Why aren’t more women standing for office? I cannot pretend to have the answer, nor do I think anyone truly does. However, I can shed a little light on the reality of the situation.

More attention is paid to sabbatical races and sabbatical officers than to the other leadership roles in our Students’ Association.This is not without reason, as our sabbaticals have dedicated a year of their lives exclusively to this task, and oversee all the other elected leaders. But it is not fair to look at sabbatical candidacy and conclude that there is a problem, which some have done. We must also examine the results of our elections. A quick perusal of yourunion.net, the Association website, will reveal that of the 5 sabbaticals (President, DoRep, DoES, DoSDA and AU President) 2 are women. Given that so many more men than women ran for office last year this relatively even split comes as a welcome surprise. The odds were stacked against our current female sabbaticals, but they won and have vindicated the voters decision on many occasions.

In the final analysis our Association presently has 39 elected positions, of which 23 are held by women. In percentage form this comes out to 59.97%, which, oddly enough is nearly the same as the percentage of women in our student body: 58%. At the end of the day we may have had more men running last year, but we had a hell of a lot more women winning. As a student body we managed to return leadership that nearly perfectly represented us in terms of sex. I would love to see an equal or proportional number of candidates put themselves forward this year, but even if we don’t get there just yet I wouldn’t be too worried. St Andrews has elected a lot of women, and six months in it’s proving to be the right choice.

Image courtesy of www.gotagirlcrush.com