NOT achieving the 30% quota for women in the cabinet was the Pakatan Harapan government’s first failure in fulfilling its election promises, said a political scientist.

But, said Dr Wong Chin Huat of Penang Institute, it is not because of patriarchy among PH parties. Rather, the country’s electoral system is to blame.

Malaysia’s winner-takes-all, single-member-candidate, first-past-the-post (FPTP) system makes it very hard to implement quotas to allow more women and members of minority groups to get picked as candidates and enter elected office.

To see more women or minorities, such as Orang Asli, become lawmakers, the new government must push for a change in the electoral system, said Wong.

PH’s failure to meet the quota is partly due to coalition politics, he told The Malaysian Insight.

“Minister and deputy minister positions were allocated to four parties – PKR, DAP, Bersatu and Amanah – as well as Parti Warisan Sabah.

“With a front-bench line-up of 50 MPs, 30% would mean 15 would have to be women. Since Bersatu and Warisan each has only one woman MP, and Amanah has none, meeting the 30% mark would mean PKR and DAP would have to overcompensate for the gender imbalance in their allies.

“However, it would disrupt the balance within the two parties if seven out of 14 positions given to PKR and six out of 12 for DAP went to women, thus, bypassing many senior male leaders.”

Bersatu, Amanah and Warisan do not have enough women MPs because they nominated too few women candidates in winnable seats.

“This is, in turn, a problem caused by our electoral system,” said Wong.

Elections that use multi-member candidates’ lists (MMM), such as in Timor Leste, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, allow parties to field more women candidates and ensure that they have a higher chance of getting elected.

According to the United Nations-affiliated Inter-parliamentary Union’s 2017 report, Timor Leste has the highest proportion of women lawmakers in Southeast Asia, at 38.5% of all legislators.

The report ranked the island nation 18th out of 193 countries.

At 49th spot is the Philippines, which has 29.5% female representation, Singapore is 73rd (23.8%) and Indonesia is 99th (19.8%).

Malaysia was ranked 156th, and its proportion, as of last year, was 10.4%.

Penang Institute’s Yeong Pey Jung said Malaysia’s proportion increased to 14.4% after the 14th general election.

About 18% of ministers and deputy ministers are women, a far cry from the 30% that PH promised during the GE14 campaign.

MMM v FPTP

In Malaysia’s single-member FPTP system, there is one candidate per parliamentary or state seat.

“To effectively implement a gender quota in an FPTP system, parties would have to field female candidates in winnable seats,” said Wong.

“But, what if those seats have strong male candidates, either incumbents or aspirants who have worked on the ground for a long time?

“It is a personal zero-sum game, and there will likely be resistance from them, and possibly, even their supporters.”

Such a system makes it hard for parties to field women, for fear that they might lose the seat because there can only be one candidate per seat.

In MMM systems, voters typically choose between lists of four to six candidates.

“If one party wins the seat, all candidates on that list become lawmakers. So, among those four to six candidates, a party can include one woman for every two men, for instance,” said Wong.

“This ensures that women also get elected, along with the rest.”

Gender quotas are easier to implement in multi-member constituencies, like “party list proportional representation”, or List-PR, in Indonesia, and Group Representation Constituencies in Singapore. – July 14, 2018.