Set up to fail: Why women still don't win elections as often as men in Canada

When Haley Brown first signed up on the Liberal Party of Canada's website, she was only expecting to lend a hand as a volunteer in the 2015 federal general election. But soon, she was asked to do much more. "A gentleman reached out to me. He took the time to get to know me and asked, 'Why don't you consider running?'" recalled the 40-year-old Calgarian. "I had never thought about that."

The party finished vetting her candidacy the day the writ dropped. She got a choice of two Calgary ridings where she might run: Calgary Midnapore against Jason Kenney, the veteran Conservative MP who had held his seat since 1997 (and who is now Alberta's premier), or Calgary Heritage against Stephen Harper, the sitting prime minister.

The campaign was bruising. Her lawn signs were vandalized. Critics attacked her on social media. "My first political debate was against Jason Kenney. I was so nervous, and it was just me, where he had this entire team." At campaign events and, even around her own volunteers, she heard people calling her a sacrifical lamb.

Perhaps not surprisingly, on Oct. 19, 2015, Brown lost, but with some consolation. Her vote tally of 14,396 was a record for the Liberals in the riding. Brown threw her hat in the ring again in 2017 when Kenney stepped down. She ran in a by-election, and lost again.

"It's not just about getting women on the ballot to run," Brown said in an interview last month. "I think once you do get women on the ballot, they can win just as often men do ... but it's to get that environment and that support structure in place that you have a woman comfortable to run."

Brown's story isn't an isolated case, according to CBC/Radio-Canada's analysis of election results for 3,882 candidates who ran for the country's biggest political parties in the 2008, 2011 and 2015 federal general elections.

We found that, not only did fewer women run for office than men in the past decade, but they were also elected less often. On average, for every 100 women running, 18 won their races, while for every 100 men running, 26 were elected. One of the factors explaining the gap: Women are more likely than men to find themselves running in hard-to-win ridings instead of in party strongholds.

Women also receive less money from their party and riding associations to fund their campaign. On average, across all parties, women received $35,838 in campaign funds compared to $40,162 for men, according to our analysis of financial filings submitted by candidates to Elections Canada.

CBC also tallied the candidates nominated so far for this October's federal general election. As of Sept. 3, women represent 40 per cent of candidates, a record. But as in previous years, only 23 per cent of these women are placed in stronghold ridings — where they are more likely to win. We still found three times more men in party strongholds than women.

CBC shared its figures with all five parties included in our analysis and asked for comment. The Liberals and the Conservatives both said they are headed toward historic highs in their recruitment of women candidates in the 2019 election but did not comment on past results. Scroll down to see each party's full comment.

We also shared our findings with Melanee Thomas, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary. In 2013, she published an academic study on women's experiences as "sacrificial lambs" in federal politics, co-written with associate professor Marc-André Bodet of Laval University. She said she wasn't surprised by CBC's figures, which included the most recent federal general election. "You're still coming up with the same conclusions. I mean, it's striking how strong the replication is," said Thomas, whose work focuses on gender-based political inequality.

"I would say that shows systemic gender bias in the system that disproportionately favours men and disproportionately hampers the participation of women in our electoral politics."

Parity between the number of men and women elected is crucial, she says, so that debates in Parliament reflect the experiences of all Canadians.

Do voters contribute to these gender-based patterns? Our findings suggest they don't. Countrywide, we found that whether men or women win, it's with the same plurality. In the past three federal elections, men who won their ridings had amassed on average 24,105 votes, compared to 23,538 votes for women who were elected. The trend was the same when they lost: defeated men lost by 7,565 votes compared to 7,480 votes for women. Thomas says recent studies showed the same conclusion. "We have really good evidence to show that Canadians don't discriminate against women at the ballot box, and we have good evidence to show that they don't discriminate against people of colour."

In her view, party leaders are directly responsible for the under-representation of women in politics. "The leaders get what the leaders want," she said. "A feminist leader would ask for a parity slate of candidates. Parity in numbers and parity in terms of where those candidates are in terms of competitiveness." It wouldn't be hard to field a gender-balanced slate of candidates — each party only has to find 169 women in a country with many millions of them, Thomas pointed out. "Why can't you convince such a small number of women to be your candidate? It is baffling to me. They are just not doing the work."

It is worth noting that, historically, men elected in stronghold ridings will often run again and again. Parties are naturally reluctant to ditch those veterans in favour of someone new and untested, whether that person is a man or a woman. But even when seats are open, men are still more likely to be placed in them, says Thomas. Our analysis makes the same observation.

Three parties responded to CBC's findings by touting what they say will be historic highs for female recruitement this coming election. "We're proud to be fielding the most female candidates in our party’s history," wrote a Conservative Party spokesperson in an email to CBC. The CPC became the first party to reach a full slate of candidates Monday — with 105 confirmed female candidates on the ballot (31 per cent of candidates).

The Liberal Party told CBC it has already changed its nomination rules so that riding associations must "conduct a thorough search for women candidates and other candidates who reflect the demographics of the community, before a nomination can proceed." The party says it's already seeing results: 52 per cent of its new candidates are women. Overall, 39 per cent of all its candidates for this coming election are women — including incumbents.

The NDP said it always "takes great care in recruiting women and [setting] them up to successfully run". The party also told CBC it is on track to become the first to achieve gender parity this coming election — it plans to run women in more than half of its ridings.

The Green Party and Bloc Québécois had not responded to CBC's request for comment by the time of publication.

Sylvia Bashevkin, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, says the theories on gender balance she was taught as a graduate student in the 1970s and 1980s haven't played out as expected. "One of the assumptions was that these patterns were likely to disappear as more women entered the paid workforce and achieved post-secondary and graduate degrees." However, even as the overall number of women candidates increased, the gender-based patterns remained, Bashevkin said. "Even if you have lots of women in those pipelines, it doesn't necessarily mean that the odds of success are going to be the same for women."

So why hasn't the political world evolved on that front? We asked Yan Plante, who worked as a strategist for the Conservative Party between 2006 and 2015. He vividly recalls his conversations with women the party wanted to recruit as candidates. He points out that an elected official must spend approximately 250 days a year in Ottawa. For a majority of candidates who do not live in Ottawa, that's a lot of time spent away from their family. "It's a real challenge to attract people to politics," said Plante, who now works for a public relations agency. "I think it's an even greater challenge for women."

To make public office more attractive, Plante says, Parliament could take a page from the private sector, where working remotely is more common. For example, elected officials could vote on legislation from home and sit in the House of Commons from Tuesdays to Thursdays instead of five days a week. "I dream of a political system where there are more women," said the father of two daughters. "Having lived it, it must be said: the more women there are, the more civilized the debate is."

Increasing the duration of each party's nomination process would go a long way, too, the University of Calgary's Thomas says. "For women, it takes them a little bit longer to organize the family side of things and to actually make a decision to run." Research also shows that the more women are in power in riding associations, the more likely it is that a woman will be nominated in that riding.

"It took me a long time to make up my mind," said journalist Anne Lagacé Dowson, who ran twice for the NDP in Montreal — in Westmount–Ville Marie in 2008 and in Papineau in 2015, where she faced Justin Trudeau — coming in second both times. "Jack Layton had to visit me at home twice! I had two young children. I had to really think about it. For women, there is a higher price to pay when you run."

She said parties should be recruiting women on an ongoing basis rather than rushing to find candidates right before an election. "That's the problem. Recruiting women is more difficult. You have to work harder [to convince them], and I don't think that work is getting done, at least not enough."

The House of Commons standing committee on the status of women studies the impact of government decisions on the lives of Canadian women. MPs from all parties sit on it, and in the summer of 2018, the committee decided to tackle the under-representation of women in politics. Melanee Thomas and Sylvia Bashevkin were among the experts who shared their research with the committee.

The committee tabled its report this past April. Among the recommendations was the obligation for parties to make public their efforts to recruit women candidates and the creation of a financial incentive to include more women in election campaigns.

The chair of the committee, Ontario Conservative Karen Vecchio, says she has no illusions about the upcoming federal election. "That report, I think, was too little, too late ... Parties have already started working on all of that over a year and a half ago, over two years ago ... I think all of the decisions for the 2019 election had already been in play for all politcial parties."