The gender quotas bill is undemocratic, unfair, and discriminatory

Cathy Larkman, Director Women’s Rights Network (WRN)

The Senedd Cymru (Electoral Candidates Lists) Bill and its passage into publication and throughout the Senedd is a sobering example of political leaders failing to listen and dismissing legitimate concerns and inconvenient truths, preferring instead the unserious politics of the echo chamber.

Groups warning of the inevitable problems of this Bill have been treated like the Trojan prophetess Cassandra – doomed to utter truths that won’t be believed.

It may be surprising than an organisation like the Women’s Rights Network would oppose a Bill that appeared set to improve the representation of women in Welsh political life, but oppose it we did, submitting a consultation response at Stage 1 of the Bill and appearing before the Reform Committee to give evidence as to why it should not pass into law.

We were not alone in our opposition either, with groups like Merched Cymru joining with us.

Discriminatory

The Bill is undemocratic, unfair, and discriminatory and had already attracted the ire of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

That other women’s equality groups are now so baffled and distressed at the scrapping of the Bill is understandable – these groups have been in a Welsh Government funded echo chamber, each telling the other what they want to hear. Until now.

The Bill would have mandated via a closed list system that at least 50% of candidates should be ‘women’. Not 50% women and 50% men and not the much trumpeted ‘gender parity’.

Electoral lists could instead have been up to 100% women, with the figures for men capped at no more than 50%. This was clearly not parity and looks very much like sex discrimination.

The Bill also dodged and weaved away from using the word ‘female’ at any time and failed to define what was meant when it referred to terms like ‘woman’ and the bizarre, ‘not a woman’. Any candidate could make an unfalsifiable ‘gender statement’ that they were a woman – no checks applied.

In an extraordinary twist of logic, this Bill could have delivered a Senedd comprised entirely of women, all of whom were male.

Parity

But why are mandatory ‘gender quotas’ even necessary? Parity between the sexes has been achieved before without quotas and would be achieved again if just four men were replaced by women.

It’s not exactly a chasm between the sexes, and it should be entirely achievable to address without the heavy-handed blunt instrument of this Bill.

Using the word ‘gender’ throughout and not ‘sex’ is so often a red flag, indicating that there is a desire to avoid the normal, well understood descriptors of biology, and to apply some fanciful ideological interpretation instead.

A previous leak of an earlier version of the Bill by ourselves revealed exactly that – the Welsh Government were interpreting ‘women’ to include men.

Self-identification of sex is not the law in the UK – as we pointed out in no uncertain terms to the Reform Committee – but the various documents accompanying the Bill made it very clear that men who wanted to self-identify as women could do just that.

The Trefynydd,  Leader of the House Jane Hutt, refused to be drawn at any time on this point but also refused the recommendation of the Stage 1 Committee that a false statement become an offence.

The Welsh Government’s promotion of self-identification is a policy position that we are strongly opposed to.

It has obvious impacts on women’s rights to single sex provision in hospital wards, intimate care settings, rape crisis centres and domestic violence refuges, as well as impacting on areas like women’s sports.

Because this is also the policy position of Plaid Cymru, the Bill faced no serious scrutiny from them and received in the main widespread uncritical Senedd support.

Self-identification

If this Bill had been passed into law, self-identification would have been formally encoded into Welsh life, with all the implications for single sex spaces and services that entails.

The Bill no doubt would have been a useful tool to advance those women who are already in political life. Unforgivably though, it provided no support or help for those women held back by the many structural and societal barriers experienced by the female sex.

Women in single parent households; women experiencing the crippling barrier of poverty; disabled women; none of these would have been helped by this Bill.

There are many excellent women out there who could and should have been supported, but this Bill entirely forgot about them.

It is hard not to draw the conclusion that the desire to introduce ‘gender quotas’ has been totemic in nature, a progressive flag to wave.

One of the most depressing aspects of the passage of this Bill has been hearing other women’s organisations avoid defining ‘woman’.

One group openly admitted in their evidence session to the Reform committee that they include men who identify as women. The scrapping of the Bill should be a moment of honest self-reflection for them all.

Supreme Court

Scrapping the Bill has also saved the Welsh Government (and the Welsh taxpayer) the huge cost of a Supreme Court referral due to their lack of legislative competence.

In an unprecedented move, the Llywydd had declared her serious concerns over the issue of legislative competence.

Equalities legislation is a reserved matter and the Bill was meddling in those reserved matters.

Many voices pointed this out, including the Reform Committee voicing their own concerns, but the Trefynydd ploughed on, maintaining she was happy that there was competence.

Interestingly, the woman who would become the new First Minster’s temporary Counsel General over the summer period, Elisabeth Jones, had put pen to paper in the consultation phase to say that in her opinion, the Welsh Government did not have the necessary legislative competence.

The Welsh public are entitled to ask why those voices have been ignored until this point. They are also entitled to ask why so much time and money has been spent developing this Bill when the inconvenient truth has been staring Welsh Government in the face all along.

We’d like to think that some answers will be forthcoming to those questions.

The new First Minister announced she was listening to the Welsh public over the summer. We suggest that regularly listening to the voices of all of the Cassandras should be included in any future such exercise.