Just make it possible to elect more women

With the August deadline drawing closer every day, the debate on how to achieve the two-thirds gender rule in Parliament, as stipulated by the Constitution, has intensified.

Without expounding on the anthropology of our patriarchal society, suffice it to state that the gender imbalance within our leadership is due to our beliefs.

The focus then should be on how we should shift societal attitudes and in doing so, adjust our voting patterns, instead of the current discourse on how to structure legal/electoral frameworks to achieve this objective.

The emphasis on legislative reform to “force” the electorate to vote for women runs the risk of tampering with the ideals of democracy and consequently, might elicit resistance from the populace. The approach should be multi-pronged, in that any modification to the legal framework should go hand in hand with interventions to change behaviour.

My view is that if more weight is placed on the idea of social re-engineering, we are more likely to hit the target. To do this, we must understand how human beings think. How irrational they are.

HERD MENTALITY

Human beings automatically do as others do. This phenomenon is colloquially referred to as herd mentality, which underpins our preference for male leadership, given our patriarchal society.

We could, however, shift perceptions by orchestrating what should be perceived as normal. Women leadership, by getting more coverage in the media, for example, could be normalised. In showcasing women in power as the norm, people would generally be more inclined to vote for them.

As we persuade the electorate to vote for women, understanding what motivates people is crucial. Ordinarily, we incentivise by focusing on what is to be gained, but theories suggest that losses loom larger than gains.

That is to say, the angst caused by loss is not equal to the pleasure induced by gaining something of equal measure. If we apply this to incentivising the citizenry to vote for women, it follows that we should focus on what is to be lost or missed out by not having female leaders as opposed to what we could gain with more women in Parliament.

We could even go as far as choice architecture at the ballot box. Suppose, for instance, on the ballot paper the default choice was the woman candidate and voters had the option to opt out and select another candidate.

Choice would still exist, but there would have been a gentle nudge to vote for the female candidate. Some would argue that such a tactic would be manipulative, but it would simply be a strategy to counter the cognitive bias against women leadership, thus neutralising factors that have influenced our choices in the first place.

Of course it would also be prudent to encourage women to put themselves up for leadership positions. To this end, we would have to eliminate the bottlenecks and barriers that exist both extrinsically and intrinsically.

This entails ensuring that it is both easy and attractive for a potential candidate to engage in elective politics. Educating on the process of the run-up to leadership and maybe even introducing a kitty to fund election campaigns for women would be one intervention that would perhaps cost less than introducing more seats to an already swollen Parliament.

Ms Thorne is a political communications consultant. [email protected].