Nanny state meets the matriarchy

If Liberal leader Sussan Ley is successful in getting more women into parliament Australia will join an exclusive club of six other nations where the number of women in the parliament is greater than 50%.

That's right, Australia will join Rwanda, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, and Andorra, as the only countries where women will outnumber men in their legislatures. (Legislature might be a loose use of the word in some of those cases.)

That suggests that while Australia in the federal parliament doesn't have a gender problem, perhaps some of the individual parties that make up that parliament do, and not necessarily a female one.

The gender numbers in the federal parliament currently sit at 112 female to 114 male. In percentages that is 49.56% to 50.44%. Shift one from the male column to the female column and it will be a tie, and if you shift 2, then the girls win.

I'm sure Sussan expects to shift more than 2.

Is this a good thing?

Well, I'm not much into gender politics. I have four children – two girls and two boys – and I wish the best for each of them. I've had no interest in preferentially advancing the interests of my two girls and they don't appear to have needed it.

I was brought up in a household with three women and a frequently absent father (at sea, sometimes for months at an end, just to make that clear). There was never any favouritism that I recall, and both my sisters have had significant careers.

Oh, and mum was a Methodist deaconess before resigning to marry Dad, so a working professional woman.

So female empowerment just isn't a particular concern for me. None of the women I have seen up close has needed a quota.

But I do have a theory that things can get out of whack, and they certainly seem to be out of whack now in some of the parties.

The table below clearly shows this.