Political equity advocates and academics often argue that we must elect more women, but what difference does it make if we do? What Women Represent shows that women can and do influence the issues raised and the decisions made in parliamentary debate and decision-making.
Using a new framework for thinking about what it means for legislators to represent women and drawing on a database that encompasses five decades of debate in the House of Commons, Erica Rayment investigates which members of Parliament represent women and what issues they address. She then examines the role women parliamentarians played in two instances where governments threatened to curtail previous gender equality gains: the Mulroney government’s attempted recriminalization of abortion and the Harper government’s plans to cut funding and weaken the mandate of Status of Women Canada. Rayment’s analysis decisively shows that parliamentary presence matters for the representation of women’s interests; women MPs, regardless of party, are more likely to act for women and play a critical role when the rights of women are at stake.
What Women Represent is the first large-scale analysis of the substantive representation of women in Canadian politics, adding depth and nuance to our understanding of issues of gender in parliamentary institutions.
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- Montreal, CA
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- Copyright 5
- Contents 8
- Tables And Figures 10
- Acknowledgments 12
- Introduction 16
- 1 Explaining The Impact Of Elected Women 30
- 2 Gender, Party, And Parliamentary Speeches About Women 60
- 3 Policy Issues In Parliamentary Speeches About Women 94
- 4 Connecting Parliamentary Speeches And Policy Action 120
- 5 The Mulroney Government And The Recriminalization Of Abortion 147
- 6 The Harper Government And Cuts To Status Of Women Canada 167
- Conclusion 190
- Appendix 1: Comparison Of Measures Of Speeches About Women 206
- Appendix 2: Unsupervised Topic Model Selection 207
- Notes 212
- References 216
- Index 238
