Important political meetings with the men photoshopped out

[noblegiraffe]

Elle's More Women video is interesting. Meetings of politicians with the men removed. Pretty stark and depressing, to be honest.

And never read the comments...

Depressing. I watched this just after I'd read this article about a recent LSE suggestion on quotas on boards and in elections, which I think feeds into the same topic. They suggest turning the concept on its head - so rather than imposing a minimum number of women for any position, consideration should be given to imposing a maximum number of men. That way it reframes the problem as the over-representation of men rather than the under-representation of women. I quite liked that, I think it makes it harder to sustain the knee-jerk "it's women's fault for not trying hard enough" reaction that some people have.

No opposition here, although as a man I'd feel more represented by a woman who shared my values and politics than some random bloke I happen to have chromosomes in common with.

Zeroing in on politics for a second could we just double down on MPs? I.E every constituency elects both a male and female candidate, and they do the job as a team? We'd achieve parity overnight without need for any sort of quota?

You know, following Dervel I've often thought that we should have more MPs anyway. Doesn't seem popular idea, I've heard of calls to reduce their numbers, but the overall number hasn't changed much for a century,whereas population levels have somewhat... Would stop their excuses for huge payrises because of complaints of overwork (not like anyone else then), as well as improve democratic representation.

But if you call for a male/ female team, you'd probably also thenneed race/ religion team members too. And class, the other ignored British divide, as Buffy says. I like the idea of maximum number of men though, why blame women for everything.

Well that's kind of where I'm headed two MP's with a requirement they both have to spend 50% of their time sitting in Parliament when in session, leaving the other free to deal with constituency matters. In addition you can introduce rules that all votes require an MP sitting in and everything getting adequate debate and consideration. In essence it would solve several problems with one stone.

Granted it doesn't solve the race issue, although I'm of the view religion should have minimal impact if at all on a secular society like ours. I say this as a man of faith myself, but people voting according to religious convictions has held up things like gay marriage and muddies the waters in the extreme on things like reproductive rights. If we're talking laws we are all subject to religion must be separate.

Actually yes I'm suspicious of religion in state matters too, slipped up there.