Farrugia has lost my vote again

Marlene Farrugia has just lost my vote again. She had won it over her stance on migrants but her stance on women appalled me. Her recent comments on the possible introduction of a quota system for women revealed how out of touch she is with her sisters.

Farrugia seems to think quotas are an insult to women, one that likens us to tuna. If she is offended at being compared to livestock then she has a very short memory and myopic vision. Women around the world are still bartered and sold, and in some places around these islands you see women treated not much better than animals. Less than a hundred years ago women had to ask men to grant them the vote. How humiliating was that? And yet, insulting as it must have been to these woman to be left out of discussions about whether they could handle the responsibility of voting, whether they would even want it, our foremothers won that right for us.

But Farrugia seems to think she got where she is all by herself. She didn’t need any quotas to become a dentist, and now there are several female dentists in Malta. Well whoopee-doodah! As is typical in this country, as soon as the quota idea was introduced, most people started to think about it on an individual and personal level. Who would benefit, would those women be as qualified as the men they would replace, and is that fair?

I suggest that that is not the level we should be considering quotas from. I encourage Dr. Farrugia to forget her personal story and look at women who are not as successful, and who are having a hard time. From this perspective, it is obvious that having more women MPs is a good thing. We need this in order to balance out the voices and issues in parliament so that women can play an equal part in determining the future of this country and in determining our own lives. We need women MPs so that the next generation of boys grow up with an image of powerful women and equal representation, and quite frankly it doesn’t matter much if the women are helped by quotas to get there – after all, isn’t all politics tainted with scheming and cheating? When were the power-games ever fair?

In principle, then, we can agree that we need more women in parliament. We could put a number on it – say 50/50 – and then it becomes a quota. Is there any non-sexist argument against this, any good reason why we shouldn’t aim, eventually, for an equal number of men and women in parliament? Of course 50/50 is a rough approximation; a completely fair quota system would adjust for all genders and not just two.

I cannot for the life of me see how anyone could reasonably be against this in principle. So I think perhaps that all the arguments against quotas that I keep hearing must be coming from the egoist mind-set that I described above, where the main issue that everyone sees is how the system would affect them personally. I submit that even if the quota system offends you personally as a woman, we need to take this insult for the sake of our sisters. We simply need more women in power.

Farrugia shot that down without further consideration, but other women MPs and MEPs have entered the discussion and now we get to see how it will be fleshed out. It’s very interesting that Muscat’s proposal will not threaten any male MPs position. Muscat is very wise, he knows his people, and he was prepared for the inevitable whining that would have resulted had he suggested removing some male MPs. There’s been enough whining on social media though, about quota systems in general, and many men reminded me of children screaming ‘not fair.’ The whole point of quotas is that the system is not fair as it currently is and we want to fix it. If you’ve been having the candy all this time and now you’re being made to share some with your sister, you can scream blue murder as much as you like, your parents are still right to impose that upon you. Necessarily, if there’s only one cake and women want a bigger share, men are going to have to adjust their appetites.

But I suspect this government just wants to magically produce a new cake out of nowhere, and offer it as another placatory freebie, this time for women. I wonder how long it can get away with this ‘abracadabra’ approach. I suspect sooner or later there will be a price to pay for it, but that won’t happen for a while, and the Labour team know it.

I encourage Dr. Farrugia to forget her personal story and look at women who are not as successful, and who are having a hard time.