“We promise equal
opportunity, not equal outcome,” says Paul Ryan, Republican nominee for Vice
President during the 2012 election. Ryan makes a valid point, one that is
painfully obvious where gender equality in Congress is concerned. In 2013, only
18.3% of the United States government consists of women, 20 of them holding
seats in the house and the remaining 78 in the House of Representatives. Says
Senator Hillary Clinton, “There cannot be true democracy unless all citizens
are able to participate fully in the lives of their country." But how are
women’s voices heard equally in a country whose beliefs are fundamentally
traditional? There is a strong argument for the implementation of political
quotas, where government would set a standard of how many women must
participate in congress through reserved seats, party percentages, or candidate
quotas. “You need quantity participation to ensure quality participation later
on,” says Fawiza Koofi, the first woman to be Second Deputy Speaker of
Parliament in Afghanistan. While quotas may be an appropriate option for other
countries, modern American identity makes such equality a nearly impossible
task.
What is perhaps the most
perplexing is the movement of American women against the implementation of
quotas. Designed to minimize stress on both genders, quotas prevent men from
straining themselves by being overly sympathetic to women, and women do
not have to act as the sole representatives for their sex. Another
misconception is that quotas discriminate against men, while their intention is
simply to limit the tendency of political parties to nominate only men. Quotas
allow women to have equal footing in a male-dominated government. It has been
shown through the experimentation of quotas in a number of other countries that
quotas led to an active recruitment of women by political parties, ultimately
resulting in a larger minority of women. By implementing a quota system and
increasing this minority, they can not only allow for a more equal government,
but change the perception of women in a positive way.
However, not all American
women agree that the perception of female politicians elected via quota would
be positive. “I didn't run as a woman, I ran as a seasoned politician and
experienced legislator,” says Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to be elected to
Speaker of the House. The fear is that if quotas are implemented, female
politicians will be delegitimized. There may also be a preconceived notion that
they are only in congress because they are women, belittling the qualifications
and standpoints they were elected for. Women do not only want to be elected
because they are women, they want to be elected because they have the right to
stand for government, and they have earned it.
Each of these oppositions
to quotas have one thing in common: they defend the American notion of
"equality". One deeply rooted in its traditional individualist, and
by extension capitalist, ideas. The classic liberal notion of equality was one
of a “competitive equality”, in which individuals begin at a similar starting
point, but may not end at the same destination. At first, all of these
individuals racing towards “equal outcome”, to use the phrase coined earlier by
Paul Ryan, were white men that formed the “White Man’s Democracy. Tolerance or
else”. In theory, this democracy has evolved over time to include peoples from
all walks of life, regardless of race or sex. However, this fails to explain
why women have been left behind, especially where politics are concerned.
Quotas, given the above
assumption is correct, allow women individuals a preference above that of all
masculine individuals. The quota would eliminate “competitiveness” of equality,
even though “removing formal boundaries does not create equal opportunity”.
What the modern United States fails to realize is that their traditional
notions are no longer valid. The modern world is no longer a “white man’s
democracy”, and though Americans today to recognize this on some level, the
concept is still ingrained in their traditionalist views of the world; views
that show through their denial of quotas even in Iraq’s democracy, or in their
failure to sign United Nations legislature against sexism in the workplace or
elsewhere.
It is not necessarily that
the USA has difficulty understanding what a quota is, but rather that they are
incapable of applying it to their own ideology.
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