Where Few Women Venture

Many times in my life, I have found myself in circles with few other women — just one of the guys. The most notable of these situations was the pre-apprenticeship plumbing training I took in the mid-90s where I was the only woman in a class of 19. Once they figured out I wasn’t afraid of hearing or using expletives and that I could keep up with the class on a physical level, they treated me equally and the hardest part was going back to the library where expletives were rather frowned upon in the course of the day’s toil.

Lately, I’ve found myself among another bunch of guys by, of all things, joining the Pirate Party of Canada. Now, there are currently a couple of thousand members and I am sure I am not the only woman who is a member but there aren’t any obvious women besides me who have contributed to the forums, put their names forward to the party executive, or have announced they plan to run in any elections — and I have to wonder why?

I know there are many, many women (especially in library circles) who care about the issues the Pirate Party promotes — stuff like copyright reform, patent reform, net neutrality, and privacy controls — so it can’t be that. Is it a tech thing? I know plenty of women who bit-torrent and use IRC and game and can install Linux (actually, scratch that last point, I don’t know a lot of women who can install Linux… but I do know women who wouldn’t be afraid to try) so I don’t think that’s it. Is it politics in general? It might be.

Getting women involved in politics is an uphill battle because I’m pretty confident that even in 2010, politics is an Old Boys’ Club. When I was in my 20s, a time that most people find their political stride, I watched two women get elected to office as their parties were on the way out the door: Kim Campbell who followed in Brian Mulroney’s shadow and Rita Johnston who followed in the wake of the Vander-scandal. The Rita one really hurt on a personal level because at the time I was on the inside of the party as a youth member and I was overjoyed that a woman had ascended to the leadership only to realize a few weeks later that she’d been installed as a scapegoat. I did not renew my party membership.

Watching the American coverage of political heavyweights Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin is also telling — as is the fact that in the best state (New Hampshire) only 37.5% of its representatives are women; involvement dips to only 10% at the low end of the scale [source]. Here in Canada, it’s not any better; women hold about 23% of Legislative positions across Canada, earning us the rank of 50th, behind Pakistan, Bolivia and the UAE [source].

I wonder though, how the numbers fall in party membership? Are the big parties more equal in their membership than in their representation? It does look like the gender issue is problematic for the Pirate Party (see this post on the issue in Germany) so I guess the next thing I have to do is to find and convince more women to join.

So I ask you, women of Canada, do you belong to a political party? Wanna talk Pirate Goals with me? No eye-patches, peg-legs or parrots required (though of course if you bring ’em to the party, we won’t discriminate either)!