Australian Parties, Not Voters, Drive Under-Representation of Women
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Parliamentary Affairs (2021) 00, 1–18 doi:10.1093/pa/gsab042
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pa/gsab042/6327506 by guest on 11 August 2021
Australian Parties, Not Voters, Drive
Under-Representation of Women
Ferran Martinez i Coma and Duncan McDonnell *
School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD 4111, Australia
*Correspondence: d.mcdonnell@griffith.edu.au
The Australian House of Representatives contains far fewer women than men. But
is this because parties of left and right discriminate against women or because vot-
ers do? Using a new dataset comprising 7271 House candidates from 2001 to
2019, firstly, we find that the percentage of women candidates is increasing, but
is consistently higher for parties of the left than the right. Secondly, women tend
to be selected more by parties of both left and right in unsafe seats. Thirdly, all
else being equal, voters reward women running for Labor with over 1400 votes
more, are neutral towards those of the Liberals and Greens, but tend to penalise
women standing for the Nationals. We conclude that, overall, it is parties, not vot-
ers, driving under-representation of women in Australia’s lower house.
Keywords: Australian Politics, Parliament, Gender and Politics, Representation,
Women Candidates
1. Introduction
While Australia was the first country in the world to allow women candidates to
compete in national elections, women still make up less than a third of the cur-
rent Australian House of Representatives (Hough, 2020).1 Even though the figure
of 31.1% women elected at the 2019 Federal Election was the highest it has been
to date, the numbers have remained around the 25–30% band for most of the last
two decades. As a result of this stagnation, Australia is currently ranked 50th
globally for the percentage of women in its lower house, having been 20th in
1
Although New Zealand in 1893 was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in
national elections, Australia in 1902 was the first to give women the right to both vote and stand as
candidates at Federal Parliament elections. However, no women were elected to the House of
Representatives or the Senate until 1943 (for a history of women’s representation in the Australian
parliament, see McCann and Sawer, 2019).
# The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and re-
production in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact
journals.permissions@oup.com2 Parliamentary Affairs
2001.2 In this article, we therefore ask: To what extent is the persistent under-
representation of women due to Australian parties selecting fewer women and/or
putting them disproportionately in unsafe seats?3 Do parties of both left and right
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do so? And to what extent is under-representation due to Australian voters dis-
criminating against women candidates?
The question of whether it is parties or voters that discriminate against women
candidates has been examined in countries, such as the USA, Canada and France
(Lawless and Pearson, 2008; Murray et al., 2012; Sevi et al., 2019), with the evidence
suggesting that it is parties, in particular those to the right of centre, not voters, that
do so. However, at least until the early years of the 21st century, Australia appeared
different, with voters, more than parties, clearly discriminating against women can-
didates (King and Leigh, 2010; see also Kelley and McAllister, 1983). Australia there-
fore is an interesting case to see whether this situation has changed in the first two
decades of the new century. There are also other advantages in focusing on
Australia. One is its political stability, as both the electoral and the party system have
remained largely unchanged. A second is that, while national gender quotas have
been adopted in over 100 countries (O’Brien and Rickne, 2016, p. 112), in Australia,
this has been left up to parties (Beauregard, 2018, p. 291). We can thus better evalu-
ate differences (and the potential cause of these) between parties.
To examine whether Australian parties and voters discriminate against female
candidates, the article proceeds as follows. The next section outlines the theoreti-
cal background and sets out our hypotheses. We then discuss the unique dataset
that we have constructed, which comprises information on 7271 House of
Representatives candidates for the period from 2001 to 2019. Following this, we
present our results. We find, first, that there have been fewer women competing
for House seats at every election than men, although there are substantive differ-
ences between the parties, with those of the left—the Australian Labor Party
(ALP) and The Greens—consistently selecting higher percentages of women can-
didates than the Liberal Party (LP) and the National Party (NP) on the right
(Kaiser, 2008).4 Secondly, women are proportionally selected in more ‘unsafe
2
For the 2020 ranking, see: https://data.ipu.org/women-ranking?month¼10&year¼2020. For 2001,
see: http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/arc/classif121001.htm
3
We consider an ‘unsafe seat’ to be any for which the distance between the first and the second party,
after distributing preferences, was less than 5 percentage points at the previous election. This interpre-
tation is the same as the Australian Electoral Commission and is what academics (Hendriks, 2017) em-
ploy to define ‘marginal’. Hence, in our article, ‘unsafe’ and ‘marginal’ seats are equivalent.
4
The Australian Greens are seen by both experts and voters as a party of the left. For example, the
Global Party Survey (Norris 2020) finds that, as regards social values, the Greens are to the left of
Labor while the NP is to the right of the Liberals (specifically, on a 1–10 scale, the Greens are at 1.3, the
ALP at 3.1, the LP at 7.8 and the NP at 8.0). Likewise, Miragliotta (2013: 715) notes that votersParties Drive Female under-Representation 3
seats’ by all parties. Thirdly, the success rates of women are not significantly dif-
ferent from those of men. In fact, our econometric analysis shows that, overall,
women tend to obtain more votes than men. Notably, ALP women candidates re-
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ceive more. In the conclusions, we summarise the main findings of the article,
contextualise them within a broader research agenda and address their practical
implications.
2. Parties, voters and women candidates
How might parties and voters discriminate against women candidates? There are
several ways in which parties can do so. One is by just not putting forward as
many of them as men. Another, slightly more subtle, method is by disproportion-
ately selecting women in unsafe seats (a strategy that could appeal to a party
which has quotas for women candidates but lacks a genuine commitment to in-
creased female representation). As regards voters, the way in which they might
discriminate against women is straightforward: all else being equal (party popu-
larity, incumbency, numbers of candidates, etc.), they might simply vote for
women less than they do for men.
These questions have been examined in recent years, mostly separately from
one another, in democracies across the world. As regards the first, of whether par-
ties field women less than men, Kenny and Verge (2016, p. 359) note: ‘the evi-
dence suggests not only that male party leaders prefer, but also that they actively
support and promote the nomination of male candidates, with women much less
likely to be approached to run for office than their male counterparts.’ They also
observe that perceptions within parties about what makes a ‘good candidate’ are
often rooted in stereotypically masculine characteristics. While Kjaer and Krook
(2019, p. 445) present a more mixed account based on their study of Danish local
elections, finding that party nominators ‘favor female candidates’, they add the
caveat that ‘the magnitude of this effect is reduced by the fact that they discrimi-
nate even more positively towards incumbents, many of which are men.’
There is also likely to be considerable variation between ideologically different
parties. As King and Leigh (2010) and Bean and McAllister (1990) showed, left-
wing minor parties in Australia in the late 20th century nominated women far
identifying as Greens showed a clear left disposition. The LP and NP tend to be seen together, but re-
main separate parties (with the exception of the state of Queensland). At the federal level, they enter
into coalition agreements when forming government, and have done so since the post-war period (in-
deed, the main non-Labor centre-right parties in Australia have acted as a coalition since the 1920s).
The LP and NP do not run a House of Representatives candidate if the incumbent is from the other
party. If a seat is up for grabs, however, they may compete against one another. The Nationals, per-
ceived as more socially conservative (Norris 2020), always have fewer elected representatives than the
Liberals and are rurally focused, with almost no presence in the cities.4 Parliamentary Affairs
more than the major parties. For example, in 1990, 44% of the Green candidates
were women, compared with just 15% of ALP and LP candidates. Since then, the
ALP has introduced quotas for women candidates, beginning with a 35% quota
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in 1994. This was then raised to 40% in 2002 (to be met by 2012) and to 50% in
2015 (to be met by 2025). As Sawer (2013, p. 106) discusses, however, these meas-
ures have not proved ‘contagious in Australia as they have in Europe’. Hence, the
Liberal and National parties have rejected quotas on the grounds that they do not
consider them meritocratic. Instead, the Liberals developed voluntary women’s
recruitment networks in the 1990s to support women seeking to stand as candi-
dates (McCann, 2013, pp. 13–14).5 When these produced few lasting results, an
internal LP report in 2016 set a ‘national aspirational target of 50% female repre-
sentation in Australian parliaments by 2025’ (McCann and Sawer, 2019, p. 490).
Finally, the Greens, while affirming a commitment in their national charter to
‘gender equity and equal opportunity, including where appropriate affirmative
action’, leave quotas up to individual state and territory branches.6 As a result,
only the New South Wales Greens make any kind of specific pledge, saying in
their constitution that ‘attempts shall be made to ensure that there is at least 50
percent representation of women.’7 At international level, studies have shown
that parties to the left are more inclined to select women candidates than those
on the right and to introduce measures enforcing this. For example, in 2001, the
UK Labour Party introduced the All-Women Shortlist (AWS) which ensured
‘that all candidates on a shortlist in a given constituency are women’ (Allen, 2018,
p. 97). This had the effect of significantly increasing the number of women in the
UK Parliament (Allen, 2018) . Similarly, following the introduction of the parity
law in France, left-wing parties selected considerably more women candidates in
2002 and 2007 than right-wing ones did (Murray et al., 2012). Likewise, in
Canada, Sevi et al. (2019, pp. 204–205) found that left wing parties were most
likely to recruit women candidates, the Liberals were in the middle, and the most
conservative parties, Reform and the Conservative Party of Canada, had the low-
est percentage of women. In Hungary, parties of the left also nominate more
women than those on the right (Vajda and Ilonszki, 2021). Given the previous
Australian studies and research conducted overseas, we therefore expect the
following:
H1: Australian left-wing parties will select higher percentages of women
candidates than right-wing parties do
5
On the history of women candidates and representatives in the LP, see Fitzherbert (2013).
6
See p. 11 of https://greens.org.au/sites/default/files/2020-07/AG_Constitution_May_2020.pdf.
7
See https://greens.org.au/nsw/about/constitution.Parties Drive Female under-Representation 5
A second way in which parties can discriminate against women is by selecting
them more than men for seats that the party is unlikely to win. This is known as
the ‘sacrificial lamb’ hypothesis (Berch, 2004) and represents what Caul (2001, p.
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1226) terms ‘more a symbolic gesture and less a reflection of real support for
women’. Again, there is considerable international evidence that this happens in
other democracies. Looking at Canadian federal elections in 2008 and 2011,
Thomas and Bodet (2013) reveal that parties of both left and right disproportion-
ately nominated women in other parties’ strongholds. Similarly, Murray et al.
(2012) show that women candidates in France are consistently put forward by
both left- and right-wing parties in the most challenging districts, whereas men
are disproportionally placed in safe seats. Likewise, in Hungary, parties of
both left and right nominate women in more unsafe seats (Vajda and Ilonszki,
2021, p. 9).
On the other hand, it is true that parties may sometimes do the opposite as
part of a deliberate strategy to increase female representation. For example, the
UK Labour Party, under Tony Blair’s leadership in 1997, fielded more women
(and ethnic minority candidates) in ‘safe and winnable seats’ for that very reason
(Bashevkin, 2000, p. 414). Historically, in Australia, however, female candidates
have been placed in unsafe seats more often than men (Bean and McAllister,
1990; McCann and Sawer, 2019). Given this, and what we have noted above re-
garding other democracies, we expect the following:
H2: Australian parties of both left and right will proportionally select more
women than men for unsafe seats
It could also be the case that it is not (or not only) Australian parties that dis-
criminate against women as candidates for the House of Representatives, but also
Australian voters. Compared with other democracies, this would be unusual. For
example, Black and Erickson (2003) showed that women running for seats in the
Canadian House of Commons in 1993 received more votes than men (after con-
trolling for incumbency, competitiveness of the seat, party affiliation and the
number of women candidates running). Again focused on Canada, Sevi et al.
(2019) found that there was no significant difference in vote share between men
and women, all else being equal (e.g. party popularity and gender bias in the geo-
graphical distribution of women candidates). Research elsewhere has produced
similar results. Murray et al. (2012) demonstrated how in France, once they con-
trolled for the safety of seats, swing and incumbency, gender had no additional
impact on the likelihood of improving a party’s performance in a specific seat.
Likewise, in Ireland, McElroy and Marsh (2010) found that voters were not re-
sponsible for women’s underrepresentation in the Dáil (Lower House of the Irish
Parliament) since gender was not a significant factor in explaining either the
number of votes received or the rank of preferences chosen by voters. Similarly,6 Parliamentary Affairs
Lawless and Pearson (2008) show that there is no voter bias against women run-
ning for the US Congress, even after controlling for a variety of factors. As regards
left–right differences, there is little specific research on the question, although
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Cutts and Widdop (2013) find that UK Labour women candidates in 2010 were
not biased against by voters. Similarly, in Hungary, Vajda and Ilonszki (2021: 10–
11) show that women from left-wing parties, and especially the Greens, generally
did better than their parties in terms of vote share.
Australian voters, however, have been an exception given that, at least up until
relatively recently, we know they did discriminate against women at the ballot
box. Based on their study of elections from 1903 to 2004, King and Leigh (2010),
observed that, on average, women candidates of the major parties in the 1990s
and the early years of the current century obtained 1.5 percentage points less than
men. These findings tally with those of other research on elections in the late 20th
century. For example, analysing the 1974, 1977 and 1980 election results, Kelley
and McAllister (1983, p. 371) discovered that women faced a ‘disadvantage of 10
per cent’ on voters’ preferences. While we are mindful, therefore, of the interna-
tional context discussed above, we propose the following hypothesis based on
those previous studies in Australia:
H3: All else being equal, Australian voters will discriminate against women
candidates
To test our three hypotheses, we use seat-level data from Australia.
Specifically, we have gathered, uniformed and processed the information pro-
vided by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on all House of
Representatives candidates between 2001 and 2019. During this period, the AEC
collected the names and surnames of the candidates, the seat for which they ran,
as well as the party or platform each candidate was associated with. Following
King and Leigh (2010), we excluded those individuals who did not spell out their
first names because we were unable to determine their gender. Doing so did not
affect the results for the parties that we focus on: the ALP, LP, NP and the
Greens. With the exception of the 2001 election, the AEC data does not contain
information on the gender of its candidates. Hence, we had to complete the miss-
ing gender information for each candidate. In all other cases, we coded candi-
dates’ names as male or female. Whenever we were unsure about the gender of a
candidate, we consulted official sources or browsed the web.
Overall, the dataset is composed of a total of 7271 candidates running for the
House in each of the 150 seats.8 The 2013 election saw the highest number of can-
didates (1188), while those in 2010 and 2016 had the lowest numbers, with 849
and 994, respectively. Overall, during that period, there were 2101 women
8
There were 151 seats at the 2019 election.Parties Drive Female under-Representation 7
candidates. The highest number of women running was 345 in the 2019 election,
while the lowest was 232 in 2010.
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3. Women candidates and election performances, 2001–2019
In presenting our results, we follow the same order as our hypotheses. We there-
fore begin by looking at the percentages of men and women that the four main
Australian parties have selected as House of Representatives candidates between
2001 and 2019 to establish whether the two left-wing parties (the ALP and the
Greens) chose a higher proportion of women than the right-wing ones (the
Liberals and the Nationals). We find, first, that the overall percentage of women
candidates has increased since 2001, but these increments have not been linear
for any of the four parties. For example, 40.7% of ALP candidates were female in
2001, but that dropped to below a third at all elections between 2004 and 2013,
before returning to 40.7% in 2016 and then rising to 45% in 2019.9 The LP also
increased its proportion of women candidates over the two decades, but at a sig-
nificantly slower pace than the ALP. LP’s percentage rose from 18.2% in 2001 to
33% in 2019, but fluctuated in the intervening period, with the figure barely sur-
passing 20% in 2010. Finally, the NP had the lowest proportion of women candi-
dates, with a minimum of 14% in 2014.10 In contrast, around 40% of the Greens
candidates have been female. In terms of left–right differences, therefore, our
results are mostly as expected, with the Greens usually having the highest percent-
age of women candidates, followed by Labor, the Liberals and, lastly, the
Nationals. There are two exceptions to this pattern: in 2001 when the Nationals
had a greater percentage (30.3%) than the Liberals (18.2%), and in 2019 when
the ALP’s share of women candidates (45%) surpassed that of the Greens
(42.4%). Irrespective of these differences, as regards our hypothesis, Figure 1
shows clearly that the two parties on the left always had a higher percentage of
women candidates than the two right-wing parties in each of the seven elections.
In examining whether parties discriminate against women, however, we need
to look not just at how many women they select as candidates, but where they run
them. This is the subject of our second hypothesis, which focuses on whether the
main Australian parties disproportionally put women in unsafe seats. To assess
9
These figures do not mean that the ALP’s quotas were not followed. In fact, it was precisely in those
years that the party’s number of women candidates for the Senate was higher (Hanrahan, 2019). In
other words, the ALP was achieving its overall quota for the combined chambers.
10
Considering the LP and NP numbers combined does not improve the picture. As in previous deca-
des (Bean and McAllister, 1990), there are significantly fewer women candidates for that coalition.
Given the lack of enforceable quotas for the LP and the NP, it is not surprising that the number of fe-
male ALP candidates is significantly higher.8 Parliamentary Affairs
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Figure 1. Women candidates of the four main Australian parties, 2001–2019
this, we first classified all seats as safe or unsafe (by checking whether the distance
between the first and the second party, after distributing preferences, was 5 per-
centage points or more at the previous election).11 Then, in Table 1, we compare
the percentages of women and men that the parties have fielded in unsafe seats.
Since a safe seat is defined by the outcome of the previous election, results for
2001 are not included.
The results in Table 1 show that female candidates consistently run for more
unsafe seats than their male counterparts. However, the dynamics vary by party.
In the ALP, female candidates have consistently stood for more unsafe seats than
men at every election since 2004 (however, the differences are only statistically
significant in the 2004 and 2013 contests). The other parties have been fielding
men and women in unsafe seats in a random pattern. However, what can be seen
is that, for any given year, when the proportion of men fielded in unsafe seats is
higher than that of women, the differences are substantially smaller than when
the proportion of women fielded is higher than men. Finally, although women
are clearly disproportionally selected for unsafe seats across the ALP, the LP and
the NP, the differences have been significant in only three elections.12 Overall,
while female candidates seem to be more likely to be fielded in unsafe seats, and
11
See footnote 3.
12
Results for the LP and the NP do not change when both parties are analysed jointly as the Coalition.Parties Drive Female under-Representation 9
Table 1 Proportion of men and women candidates fielded in unsafe seats
Year Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women
(overall) (overall) ALP ALP LP LP NP NP Green Green
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2001
2004 14.3 19 7.8 27 14.8 9.4 20 25 10.7 19.3
2007 14 15.8 12 17 13.1 17.1 5 16.7 15.7 11.5
2010 17.8 20.7 16 22 17.2 8.3 20 0a 16.8 16.4
2013 13.7 16.7 9.9 20.4 11.2 16.6 16.3 14.3 15.6 10.4
2016 12.2 15.6 12.3 13.1 11.7 18.7 12.2 9 8.8 16.7
2019 14 17 10.8 19.1 11 13.9 16.2 50 16.1 12.5
Note: Pearson chi-square results for this table are: unshaded areas: no significance; 2004 area shaded in grey:
p ¼ 0.00 *** ; 2013 area shaded in grey: p¼.07 *; 2019 area shaded in grey: p ¼ 0.02 **.
a
The NP did not present any female candidate in 2010 in the most competitive seats.
Source: Australian Electoral Commission. Authors’ own elaboration.
the ‘sacrificial lamb’ hypothesis is thus at play for some elections and some par-
ties, our evidence is not conclusive for its support.
Our third hypothesis focuses on voters rather than parties. Specifically, we
investigate whether, all else being equal, Australian voters discriminate against
women candidates for the House of Representatives, as studies from previous
decades had indicated (Kelley and McAllister, 1983; King and Leigh, 2010),
or whether they are now in line with voters in other democracies like France
(Murray et al., 2012), Canada (Sevi et al., 2019) and Ireland (McElroy and
Marsh, 2010). We examine this question from two complementary perspec-
tives. The first compares female and male success rates—measured as the pro-
portion of those fielded versus those elected—in order to see if they are
similar, since this would indicate that the electoral environment is gender neu-
tral in terms of results. The second assesses whether female candidates obtain
different numbers of votes than male candidates when also allowing for other
possible factors. First and foremost is the impact of incumbency on the elec-
toral success of women. In a nutshell: since those candidates who have been
previously elected are likely to be re-elected and these tend to be men, the
likelihood of women being elected is inevitably lower. Another factor is the
number of candidates in a district (King and Leigh, 2010). The logic here is
that the more candidates are present, the less likely they all are to attract
votes. This argument is usually not considered in first-past-the post systems,
but, given that Australia uses a majority-preferential system for the House of
Representatives, it is important to take into account here.
Table 2 shows the success—measured as the proportion of those fielded versus
those elected—of all men and women candidates who have contested House10 Parliamentary Affairs
Table 2. Gender success rate by political party
Year Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women
(overall) (overall) ALP ALP LP LP NP NP Green Green
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a
2001 14.6 13.9 48.3 36.1 49 62.5 47.8 30 .
a
2004 13.8 13.6 37.2 45.8 57.4 50 55 50 .
a
2007 14 14.7 51.8 58.7 42.4 37.1 50 16.7 .
2010 18.1 16.4 43.7 51.1 37.9 50 64.1 42.9 100b 0
2013 12.9 11.9 34.6 40.8 55 50 62.8 57.1 100b 0
2016 15.9 13.5 46.1 45.9 44.1 34.4 68.3 27.2 100b 0
2019 14.3 14.2 48.2 41.2 42.7 36.1 67.4 40 100b 0
Note: Pearson chi-square results for this table are: unshaded areas: no significance; 2016 area shaded in grey:
p ¼ 0.01 ***.
a
No candidate of the Greens was elected.
b
Only one candidate of the Greens was elected.
Source: Australian Electoral Commission. Authors’ own elaboration.
elections since 2001. For reference, we can see that out of all men who ran in 2013
(out of 851), 12.9% were elected, whereas 18.1% (out of 617) were elected in
2010. Among women candidates, the percentages are not very different: 11.9%
(out of 337) were elected in 2013 versus 16.4% (out of 232) in 2010. Again, how-
ever, there are differences between the parties. ALP female candidates have per-
formed substantially better than ALP male candidates at four elections (2004,
2007, 2010 and 2013) and worse in two (2001 and 2019), while LP female candi-
dates have performed better than males in some contests and worse in others. It
is only NP female candidates who have consistently performed worse than their
male counterparts, with 2016 being especially bad for them.
Our final analysis examines whether female candidates’ overall performance is
significantly different from that of men when also considering other potentially
relevant independent variables. To do this, we estimate a series of regressions in
which the dependent variable is the number of votes awarded to a candidate (i.e.
the first-preference votes received by candidates in every federal division at all
House elections from 2001 until 2019).13 The main independent variable of inter-
est is gender, which is assigned the value 0 for male candidates and 1 for female
ones. If gender does not impact votes, then it would have a non-significant coeffi-
cient. A setting benefiting women candidates would present a positive and signifi-
cant coefficient for gender, while a negative and significant coefficient for gender
would indicate that male candidates perform better.
13
This ranges from a minimum of 59 votes in 2007 for Warwick William Hunt of the Citizens
Electoral Council in the division of Gilmore (NSW) to a maximum of 66,298 votes in 2010 for Julia
Gillard of the ALP in Lalor (VIC).Parties Drive Female under-Representation 11
As a control, we created a dichotomous variable indicating whether a candi-
date was the incumbent (1) or not (0) with the expectation that there would be a
positive relationship with the number of votes, all else being constant. As a sec-
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ond control, we considered the number of candidates present in any given district
for each election. This is because the more candidates there are in an election, the
less likely each is to attract votes.14 As a third control, following Fulton’s (2012)
study, we also included the lagged value of the dependent variable, as we assumed
that a current candidate’s performance will be affected by the previous result.
Including the previous number of votes is a conservative approach for testing the
hypothesis that gender matters for the result of the election, as these specifications
are known to bias coefficient estimates downward (Achen, 2000). As a final con-
trol, we include seat marginality, defined as the difference between the two main
parties at the previous election. The logic here is that the smaller the margin be-
tween the two largest parties in the electoral division, the greater the likelihood
that they concentrate more votes in that district. In other words, this variable is a
proxy for the competitiveness of the district between the main parties. We rely on
a three-level multilevel random effects model where observations from the same
candidates (level 1) are nested within candidates (level 2), and candidates are
nested within divisions (level 3). We also control for state and election-year fixed
effects. As a robustness check (not reported), we also estimate the model relying
on ordinary least squares estimation, with standard errors clustered at the federal
division level and state and election-year fixed effects, which leads to very similar
results.
We have shown above that the actions of the parties towards female candidates
have been substantively different. Hence, in M1–M8, we analyse the impact of
gender on the party’s vote share. The result of interest for the ALP (M1) in Table
3 is the gender variable, with a positive and significant coefficient: everything else
being constant, ALP female candidates receive over 1400 votes than the male can-
didates. Though the size of the effect is significant, it needs to be contextualised
via the inclusion of the other variables. For example, we consider the effect size
with the other dichotomous variable in the model: whether the candidate is an in-
cumbent or not has a positive and significant effect, with an impact of over 6700
votes. At the same time, for each additional candidate in the district, the number
of votes declines by more than 500, all else being equal. Finally, and unsurpris-
ingly, every vote in the previous election brings over 0.52 votes in the next one.
The results for the rest of the parties are very different. The direction of the
results for the LP and the Greens are the same as for the ALP; however, the size
14
The number of candidates ranged from three in Bradfield (NSW) in 2010 to 16 in Melbourne (VIC)
in 201312
Table 3. Women candidates’ overall performance at the polls
M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8
ALP ALP LP LP NP NP GRN GRN
Gender 1442*** 1900*** 144.4 9.590 1097 1826 38.15 10.53
Parliamentary Affairs
(443.7) (511.5) (502.6) (521.7) (2085) (2426) (134.0) (165.4)
Lagged no. of votes 0.527*** 0.502*** 0.423*** 0.451*** 0.126*** 0.0831* 0.990*** 0.886***
(0.0269) (0.0282) (0.0227) (0.0234) (0.0448) (0.0465) (0.0205) (0.0229)
Incumbent 6701*** 7211*** 8203*** 8860*** 6774*** 6831*** 6377*** 9388***
(517.1) (581.2) (479.5) (508.0) (920.8) (923.9) (1090) (1359)
No. of district candidates 510.4*** 342.8*** 344.4*** 113.7 1149*** 909.4*** 226.5*** 489.7***
(112.4) (118.3) (111.1) (111.2) (250.5) (217.5) (39.77) (44.71)
Votes margin 0.104*** 0.0663*** 0.141*** 0.0918*** 0.169*** 0.0646 0.00589 0.00460
(0.0205) (0.0226) (0.0211) (0.0216) (0.0587) (0.0594) (0.00675) (0.00808)
State 166.5 45.61 3652*** 69.42*
(106.3) (96.95) (543.2) (36.76)
Year 120.4*** 69.05 344.0*** 53.18***
(42.48) (42.32) (109.2) (17.62)
Constant 22,011*** 258,377*** 26,936*** 119,397 33,910*** 645,591*** 3986*** 111,876***
(2470) (85,403) (1942) (84,876) (3063) (218,749) (700.4) (35,391)
Year fixed effects Y N Y N Y N Y N
State fixed effects Y N Y N Y N Y N
Observations 884 884 654 654 226 226 869 869
Number of groups 537 537 409 409 124 124 720 720
Robust standard errors in parentheses.
***
p < 0.01; **p < 0.05; *p < 0.1.
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and non-significance of the coefficient indicate that the gender of the candidates
has not been a relevant matter for those voters. By contrast, NP voters seem to pe-
nalise female candidates. The rest of the variables, overall, behave very similarly
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for all parties. Incumbency reaches its highest value for LP candidates, while for
the NP and the Greens, this value is very similar to that for the ALP. Lagged votes
have a significant and positive effect for all parties as does the margin of votes for
the LP and the NP. The number of candidates in the district negatively affects the
number of votes obtained. To summarise the results, therefore, while voters have
clearly favoured ALP women candidates compared to male ones, they have not
done likewise for female candidates from the LP and Greens (nor, however, can
we say that voters have discriminated against them).
We have run several robustness checks. First, models M2, M4, M6 and M8
replicate the models M1, M3, M5 and M7 without year fixed and state effects, re-
spectively. The direction and significance of the results are very similar. Secondly,
we have excluded each state one at a time from our analysis. Obviously, the num-
ber of observations declines, but the results are consistent, with a positive coeffi-
cient for gender. When looking at the ALP, women candidates bring a minimum
of 1058 votes if we exclude Victoria (p < 0.013), and over 1659 votes if we ex-
clude Western Australia (p < 0.07). The coefficients for the LP and the Greens are
not significant, but they are positive. For the NP, however, they are not significant
but always negative. Thirdly, when excluding each election year at a time, we find
that female candidates’ coefficients are always positive and significant for the
ALP, bringing a minimum of 743 votes more than men (p < 0.04) when exclud-
ing 2010, and a maximum of 1818 votes (p < 0.00) when excluding 2004. Gender
coefficients for the LP and the Greens are positive though not significant. For the
NP, the coefficients are negative but not significant. These results are available in
Tables RC1 and RC2 of the Supplementary Appendix.
Finally, we re-estimated the models after modifying the dependent variable.
Instead of the number of votes, the percentage of votes received by the candidates
was used. Clearly, these two variables are highly correlated, but this assessment
was carried out assuming that the correlation was not perfect. For example, Julia
Gillard was the candidate with the most votes in 2010, but was not the candidate
with the highest percentage of votes. A replication of the eight models in Table 3
with this measurement shows that the results do not change much in terms of sig-
nificance and direction. Coefficients, though, must be interpreted in terms of the
percentage of the vote rather than number of votes. Table RC3 in the
Supplementary Appendix presents the coefficients for this approach indicating
that, overall, female candidates bring about 1.5% more votes than male candi-
dates for the ALP. Our results thus show that, contrary to the findings of studies14 Parliamentary Affairs
from the late 20th and early 21st century, Australian voters no longer discrimi-
nate against female candidates.
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4. Conclusion
In 1976, Bronwyn Stevens and Patrick Weller edited a book called The Australian
Labor Party and Federal Politics. Chapter 5 was entitled ‘Women in the Federal Labor
Party’, but was left entirely blank. The authors explain in the preface that ‘chapter 5 is
not a printer’s error’, but instead was meant to underline the marginalised position
of women in the ALP (Stevens and Weller, 1976, p. vii). In the ensuing decades, re-
search showed that not only did Australian parties tend to discriminate against
women candidates at House of Representative elections, but so too did Australian
voters until the early 2000s (Kelley and McAllister, 1983; King and Leigh, 2010).
Australia thus appeared out of step with other Western democracies such as the
USA, Canada, France and Ireland where it was just parties, not voters, that did so.
In this article, we set out to see if Australia remains exceptional in this sense.
We therefore investigated whether the four main Australian parties of both left
and right—Labor, the Greens, the LP and the NP—selected more men than
women as House of Representatives candidates between 2001 and 2019, whether
they proportionally selected more women than men for unsafe seats, and, finally,
whether, all else being equal, Australian voters still discriminated against women
candidates. We found, first, that although the number of female candidates for
the lower house has increased over the first two decades of the 21st century, this
rise has not been linear. Women still run less than men, and the gap in terms of
numbers of female and male candidates is significantly higher for the two parties
of the right than those of the left. Moreover, we saw that the ALP’s enforceable
quota system for women candidates has evidently had more of an effect than the
non-binding aspirations of other parties. In fact, at the 2019 election, the ALP be-
came the party with the highest percentage of women candidates (surpassing the
Greens for the first time). Secondly, we showed that women continue to be dis-
proportionately chosen for unsafe seats by the major centre-left and centre-right
forces, although the differences were not always significant. From our results, it
seems there may be a degree of ‘box ticking’ at work for the ALP. In other words,
the party’s need to meet its quota requirements leads it to select more women as
candidates, but it does not put them to the same degree as men in seats they are
likely to win.15 It also follows that, if the parties selected women in the same
15
Given that the ALP in some states (e.g. Queensland and New South Wales) now also has quotas for
Indigenous candidates, it would be worth investigating whether a ‘sacrificial lamb’ dynamic exists in
order to meet those quotas. In other words: are Indigenous candidates disproportionately placed in
unsafe seats?Parties Drive Female under-Representation 15
percentage of safe and unsafe seats as they do men, the number of women today
in the House of Representatives would be greater.
We then examined whether Australian voters discriminate against women. We
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found that they do not and that Australia has, at least in this sense, come into line
with other Western democracies. Not only do female candidates for the House of
Representatives now have the same success rates as men, but they also bring in over
1400 voters more in the case of the ALP. For the LP and Greens candidates, we saw
that being a woman is less significant as regards the votes achieved, but it is certainly
not a penalising factor. Finally, in the case of the Nationals, their supporters seem to
discriminate against women candidates as their coefficient is negative (but it is
never significant). These partisan differences in our results between the largest
centre-right and centre-left parties resemble those found in the USA by Lawless and
Pearson (2008). As they note, Democratic women candidates after 1990 began to
do better than men, while Republican women, although not performing as well as
those in Democratic Party, ‘generally do not fare worse than their male counter-
parts’ (Lawless and Pearson, 2008, p. 77). This shift has clearly taken longer to occur
in Australia, but, when it has occurred, it has followed the same pattern of women
candidates in the major centre-left party doing better than men, while women from
the main centre-right party at least do not pay a penalty with voters.
This last finding raises the question of why women, overall, do better. The an-
swer may, at least in part, be that, given the extra obstacles they encounter, the
women who are eventually selected are simply better candidates. There is histori-
cal support for this both in Australia and elsewhere. For example, based on data
collected for the 1987 Australian federal election, Studlar and McAllister (1991,
p. 480) noted that ‘women who do become nominees tend to be better party acti-
vists than comparable men.’ This may therefore still be true and would fit with re-
search by Black and Erickson (2000, p. 32) who found that, in Canada, ‘women
need to accumulate more and alternate forms of the appropriate resources when
compared to men’. Likewise, Fulton (2012, p. 310), writing on US congressional
districts, observed that women need to ‘work harder at developing greater politi-
cal quality to be equally competitive’.
Our results also shed light on possible avenues of action if the main Australian
parties genuinely want to increase the number of women in the House of
Representatives. It seems clear that the LP’s ‘aspirational target’ of 50% female
representation in parliament by 2025 is unlikely to be achieved given its current
percentages of female candidates (McCann and Sawer, 2019, p. 490). Or, as for-
mer Liberal member of the Victorian state parliament, Margaret Fitzherbert
(2013, p. 8) put it, the Liberals need to ‘stop relying on a blind faith in “merit” to
somehow provide a sudden increase in numbers of Female MPs’. Judging by the
ALP’s experience and evidence from other countries (Krook, 2009), enforceable
quotas would not only increase the amount of women candidates put forward by16 Parliamentary Affairs
the LP and NP (and perhaps also by the Greens), but would also have at least
some impact on the numbers of women eventually elected to parliament.16
For its part, the ALP needs to build on the progress its quota system has
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achieved, by putting more women in safe seats. Indeed, even taking a purely vote-
seeking approach, this issue should matter to parties. During the 2001–2019 pe-
riod that we have focused on, almost 3% of the federal seats were decided by less
than 1000 votes. For example, in 2019, in the federal division of Macquarie, the
ALP took the seat by 371 votes. At the same election, the Liberal candidate in Bass
won by 563. So, even if the parties may waver in their commitment to fielding
more women candidates, the simple desire to win elections ought to push them to
do so. Finally, of course, there are evident benefits to having more women run as
candidates and to having more women in Australia’s main legislative institution.
As Allen (2018, p. 74) argues, these benefits go beyond obvious concerns about de-
scriptive representation, and include the fact that women in parliament are said to
be more collegiate and more inclined to find bipartisan solutions.17 In sum, given
that Australian voters no longer discriminate against women candidates, it is
surely not in the interests of parties to continue doing so either.
Funding
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, Discovery Project
(grant number DP190101978).
Acknowledgements
A very early version of this paper was presented at the 2019 ‘Political
Organisations and Participation’ workshop in Canberra. The authors would like
to thank the participants for their feedback. They are also very grateful to Sofia
Ammassari, Fabrizio Carmignani, Ignacio Lago, Andrew Leigh, and Lee
Morgenbesser for their comments on later drafts of the paper.
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to report.
16
Moreover, as Allen (2018: 99) notes, and against the ‘merit’ argument advanced by the Liberals and
Nationals, there is no evidence that quotas result ‘in lower-quality candidates as measured by tradi-
tional metrics’. In fact, he argues, the opposite may be true.
17
A further benefit for the Australian parliament would be that having a greater number of women
representatives might serve to redress the culture of misogyny that has characterized that institution
(Sawer, 2013).Parties Drive Female under-Representation 17
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