by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)
Although most Canadian women have had the right to vote for a century, they haven’t rush to get their names on the ballots. While they have been more willing to do so since the mid-1970s, they have consistently been outnumbered by men. Sadly, the situation is poised to worsen, as many women who did get elected reported in the 2020s that they had chosen to retire from politics due to what many have called a “toxic” and ultra-partisan environment, thereby not encouraging other women to step forward.
When Justin Trudeau formed his first government, a journalist asked him why one of his priorities was to have a cabinet that was gender balanced. After a short pause, he responded, “Because it’s 2015.” That elicited thunderous applause from the audience, but the truth is that it could not have been easy — not because women can’t be good ministers, but because of simple math: excluding himself, he had 133 men but only 50 women to choose from. And he also had to maintain a balance of regional representation.
Let’s imagine a legislature with 100 seats and a general election in which three persons choose to run for each seat. If only 50 of those 300 candidates are women and no woman is running against another for one of those 100 seats, every woman would have to be elected to achieve parity. That would be unlikely to happen, especially in ridings that are strongholds for a given party but the women happen to be running for another party. In all jurisdictions covered by PoliCan, only a handful of women would run in each general elections until the mid-1970s, and while they are more numerous today, they remain outnumbered by men.
Therefore, looking at absolute numbers is insufficient to determine if being a woman is a hindrance to winning a seat, so this search engine allows you to compare for each legislature the percentage of candidates who were women to the percentage of seats that were won by women. Statisticians could run more advanced probability models, but the data visualization graphics this engine generates do help most of us to see that the trend until recently in most jurisdictions is that having more women candidates did or does not necessarily result in a proportional increase in the number of women being elected. We can also see if elected women have tended to be more on the government or the opposition side.
Select a jurisdiction to compare those percentages.
Reducing the date span can make the information on the graphics easier to absorb.
