Achieving Gender Parity in Local Government

In honour of International Women’s Day I encourage you to consider these ideas and to share your feedback.

With only two inexpensive tweaks to the way we run municipal elections, we could greatly improve local governments by encouraging a wider range of candidates and ensuring diversity of representatives.

The first tweak is to migrate away from a mix of “Ward” and “At-Large” methods in municipal elections, to “At-Large” only for all positions.?Ward systems are those in which candidates campaign to represent one geographic area within the greater municipality.?This is how local and regional councillors are typically elected in Ontario and many other jurisdictions.?Under At-Large, candidates campaign across the entire municipality, which is how we typically elect our mayors.

By implementing At-Large for all positions, we avoid many Ward weaknesses including: ?councillors who are hyper-focussed on their individual wards (i.e. NIMBYISM); ward boundaries that need costly redrawing as populations change (and that incumbent councillors are biased to have redrawn in their favour); and, reducing the probability of incumbents being acclaimed.

The second tweak is to embed gender parity into local governments, as research studies have shown that more women in leadership roles provide greater diversity of ideas, greater collaboration, and better outcomes.?

The At-Large method makes it possible and practical to designate half the seats to women and half to men.?Doing so would mean that women would campaign only against other women and men only against other men, eliminating the oft-perceived attitude that “politics is a man’s game” and thereby encourage more women to participate in politics.?There would be separate ballots, and only in the cases where not enough of both were nominated would there be deviations from 50/50.?And even though there would still be only one mayor, there would be a larger pool of experienced male and female councillors to step up next election.

The above could also work well for two tier-municipalities, such as my City of Pickering, which is part of The Regional Municipality of Durham.?We currently elect three Pickering-only councillors, three Pickering + Durham Councillors, and one mayor serving both the city and the region.?I propose that we elect six Pickering-only councillors, and then draw names, one from each of the pools of men and women, and one more of the opposite gender of the mayor.?This would ensure gender parity representation at the region.

While no electoral system is perfect, these tweaks get us much closer.

For a PDF of this article and its bibliography (I'm a college prof, after all), click: https://tinyurl.com/LocalGenderParityPDF