Iceland almost gets female-majority parliament | Hacker News Reader

Iceland almost gets female-majority parliament

apnews.com

136 pointsMilnerRoute130 comments

Sorry to blow the thunder but due to a recount in one of the constituencies we no longer have a female majority in the Parliament. 3 women lost their seats to men.

I've changed the title above to reflect what the article now says.

Submitted title was "Iceland elects its first female-majority parliament", which I assume is what it originally said.

Oh gosh, the comment section will be fun no doubt.

Anyway, as a matter of curiosity I counted the Dutch parliament, and 60 out of 150 seats are taken by women, or exactly 40%. I was just curious how it compares (data isn't on the website, so I just counted manually from the pictures, may be off by one or two members by accident; data at [1]).

I had expected the younger MPs to be more balanced, but it seems it's the 40-50 bracket that's the "most equal": almost 50%, vs. 20% of under 40s. Not sure what to make of this; maybe women are more likely to go in to politics after pregnancy? Not sure...

Would be interesting to do a more detailed analysis over more elections.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/arp242/edc381cc34a437662be931d1783bf...

fascinating that there first possibility considered is something related to pregnancy, rather than something about having grown up in the 1970's and before vs 1980's and above! Can't think of any single generational difference either?

I don't get it? What happened in 1980's that would make women less likely to go into politics?

It's just that it's the major and obvious difference between the lives of men and women, and it seems like a logical place to start. Undoubtedly there are other factors too – my comment wasn't intended as a complete explanation.

> something about having grown up in the 1970's and before vs 1980's and above! Can't think of any single generational difference either?

I don't know what your point is exactly?

For myself, I can tell with certainty that having small child and bigger one is massive differences in terms of how much time I have for other things. In general, women are more likely to be primary care giver, so this can make difference.

Sorry, after a recount that finished in the northwest constituency just over an hour ago this isn't valid anymore. Women are not in the majority anymore.

I wouldn't celebrate too much. We recently had a female prime minister who was probably the shittest in British history (until her successor).

And yet Merkel and Arden seem great. It's almost like gender isn't the characteristic that marks a good politician after all...

Why do you think May and Johnson are incredibly bad at this?

Their party's ideology?

And that those folks usually can't relate to the normal person on the street?

Which results in them not really giving a toss about them or not caring about what it means to cut £20 weekly for people already struggling while we are going into winter with higher energy prices.

One of the great things about equality is that women get to be terrible people too, given the same opportunities. We're not some magical race of angels.

Exactly. So shouldn't there be more of a push for a meritocracy instead of this incessant chasing of equal gender ratios?

Dig down enough and all so called merit comes down to luck. And no, we shouldn't push for putting all lucky people in power.

Ah I see. So you'd rather have a random selection of people attempting to do jobs they're not much good at, who are lucky enough to possess certain characteristics. Right...

I've always had the feeling Thatcher was overcompensating for being a woman by being "the tough guy". It worked, too; in the early days of the Clinton presidency Hillary – already more than ten years after Thatcher got elected – famously got asked for a cookie recipe. No one would have dared ask Maggie for her cookie recipes (but have Dennis had some?)

It's understandable to some degree, but in such a position it has real consequences for people.

I always look at how the gender ratio is in high-ranking and low-ranking party members. Usually the ratio is quite similar, which is most likely optimal from a equality perspective I'd say.

I for one going to look forward for a world ruled by women, it has been mostly dominated by mens and look where we are at now...

The corresponding number in the US for 2021 is 26.7%. The highest ever..

important note before reading the comment section in any part of the internet:

some people will never be happy, and will try to make happy people less happy.

This is super exciting and I'm proud of Iceland!

Thank you! As an Icelandic guy, we're extremely happy about this :)

Could you explain in detail why you're happy about this?

In a society without a history of male dominance over women, having a legislative body with more women than men would be commonplace or at least unremarkable. In virtually all societies through all of history, this has not been the case. So the fact that such a thing has now occurred is an indicator of reduced male dominance, something we should all be happy about.

This point of view assumes women have the same interests as men but were held back by society. What if women are just less interested in politics?

Edit: I should have worded it better. I meant political careers.

My point assumes no such thing. If you have a point to make yourself, feel free to make it instead of asking leading questions.

Women were held back by society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage

Participation in politics has been on the rise ever since, it has never yet equalized. We have data to show that interest is greater than participation, and documented history that explains why.

At the time of women was allowed to vote in Sweden, only 10% of men was allowed to vote.

One of the forgotten events caused by the early 1900 was the separation of military service with voting rights. Until then a fulfilled military service to ones country was a common condition for voting. Many restrictions on voting was removed during those early decades, including many that prevented many women from voting after the women's suffrage. Conditions like having paid taxes for a set amount of previous years, not having social support, and so on.

A Wikipedia article is not a good answer to most things, they're usually single takes and generally aren't broad enough in focus. Wikipedia is a good jump off point for subjects you generally don't know anything about, but that's really it.

Take the article you linked; while it does show example of how women were repressed in the past, it doesn't go that far into why they were repressed and how men were also repressed at the time. As someone what likes to read up on medieval European history, there's just so much more to it.

I understand the appeal of Wikipedia, but it should really not be treated as anything but an opinion piece that requires further research and reading. While you can read some good articles, they are few and far between (and often only show one viewpoint).

Absolutely, the whole intent of my link was to be a starting point for the curious. I don’t see any reason not to prefer a small starting point like a Wikipedia article on Women’s Suffrage, which seems like a nice clear and factual demonstration of the problems with @vimy’s assumptions, especially in a heated controversial topic on HN. If I came on strong and tried to dump something complete - well ignoring that there’s no such thing on this topic, I’d expect it to cause argument, get downvoted, or be ignored. Anyway, by all means if you have a better example, I’d welcome it. If @vimy is serious about their question, and curious whether women want political careers, and whether gender preferences have settled, then a good starting point is recent history. The web page I linked shows that Vice President Kamala Harris was born before black women were allowed to vote everywhere in the U.S. That’s remarkable and relevant to the question they raised, it’s surprising how recently women were allowed to be political, and surprising how quickly things have changed.

I think you misinterpreted what I said. I never said women weren't held back. Only that there could be a different reason for the lack of women in politics.

Are you sure I misinterpreted? Your restated position sounds the same as what I heard above, the message seems the same, and my reaction is the same: that maybe you don’t really know any history and don’t understand how recently women were not allowed to participate in politics. What makes you think there could a different reason, when there are women still alive today who weren’t allowed to vote, let alone seek office in their lifetimes? The only reason to suggest there’s a different reason is to try to downplay bias, to resist acknowledging the truth that society did hold women back, and that we haven’t yet recovered from that. You’re suggesting an unspecified alternative to what we already know is the reason, because it was documented.

The number of women in politics is increasing today, right now. (The article is only one of many examples.) The number has gone up multiples during your lifetime. So it’s very clear that you can’t claim the numbers are the way they are because of some “different reason”. The number of women interested in politics (and business, and medicine, and engineering…) are still growing and responding to the recent decision to stop discriminating. We can’t make conclusions about any other reasons until the distribution of women in politics settles, for a long time, and in many countries. Right now, that’s not the case, right now more and more women are seeking political careers.

Recent decision? I think it’s you who has a warped view of history. And a very black and white one.

Yes, 50 years, even 100 years, is very recent in social cultural terms - they are within the lifetime of a single person, which is shorter than it takes for some attitudes to change. What do you mean by warped and black and white? Please elaborate. Just like your comments above, this is vague and unspecific and unconstructive. I think laws preventing women from voting was pretty black and white, so what nuance am I missing, exactly? Were you really wondering whether women want to have political careers, or do you hope not? Are you upset by the fact that increasing numbers of women are becoming career politicians?

Black and white thinking: There is only one explanation. Someone who disagrees is automatically a misogynist.

What other explanations do you have in mind? What “different reasons” are there? Do the reasons you have in mind account for the fact that female representation is growing year over year?

I don’t think you’re a misogynist, I wasn’t talking about you. But you are providing multiple comments’ evidence that you may lack historical background and might lack the will to think critically and self-reflect about your own learned assumptions and where you got them, that you might have been trying to make a rhetorical point and aren’t interested in a discussion or in the real answer to the very question you asked - whether women are interested in politics. Answer: they are increasingly. The idea that there are “different reasons” and other explanations besides social bias has historically been a talking point for people who don’t want to either accept or admit that cultural sexism still exists, that’s the undercurrent of your comments even if it’s unintentional on your part. Casting vague criticisms toward me doesn’t change the provenance of the ideas you’ve adopted and shared here. The very idea that there are “different reasons” was suggesting that the discrepancy between male and female representation could be at some kind of natural balance, right? I mean you stated it explicitly, that preferences might explain today’s balance. But it’s not in balance now, and never has been, that’s a fact we know for certain.

The data we have - from the fact that there were basically zero women with political careers as little as 100 years ago, to the fact that the number of women in politics has been and continues to steadily increase - the things I’m pointing out pertain to the question of whether there are any other relevant explanations that matter right now.

I’m not claiming that there are no sex/gender differences, nor that the numbers should be exactly 50/50. What I’m saying is that the fact that women were (and still are) held back by society obviously shadows all other reasons to this day. We can’t begin to ask whether there are other reasons until we’ve ruled out cultural bias, and we have tons and tons of ongoing data that proves beyond any shadow of doubt that we have not yet fixed cultural bias.

Suppose there were additional reasons reasons for today’s gender discrepancy in politics (and I’m sure there are some, like pregnancy). If the reason changed the distribution by 0.1%, would you say that it’s relevant and worth talking about? How would we actually measure it? In terms of what we should do as a society, how would it inform our opinions and policies?

At the top of the thread, you asked unironically “what if women are just less interested in politics?” My question to you is: what if interest in politics is primarily determined by cultural biases? What if women thirty years ago said they were less interested in politics precisely because they knew it was a terribly sexist environment? What if that’s still the case to some degree? How would you actually determine which preferences are determined by sex or gender, and which preferences are the result of ongoing discrimination?

> In a society without a history of male dominance over women, having a legislative body with more women than men would be commonplace or at least unremarkable. In virtually all societies through all of history, this has not been the case. So the fact that such a thing has now occurred is an indicator of reduced male dominance, something we should all be happy about.

You can only come to a conclusion like that through an ignorance of history, or willful ignorance of societies where females exercised power. Although, I would separate matriarchies from matrilineal societies, and also, societies in which women exerted a great deal of power through soft means.

For example, a list of pure matriarchies

Ancient Amazons

Iroquois Confederacy

The Mosuo people

The Hopi people

Some Celtic tribes

A list of kingdoms with female rulers of note:

England, during some of its most important years [1]

A list of Queens Regnant which includes ancient Egypt, Rome, and many, many others [2]

Additionally, this would also include periods of Queen Regency too [3]

Just to name a few

A list of Matrilineal societies:

Jews

Sparta

Scotland

Much of Africa

If we remember many monarchies, autocracies, and other forms of government had powerful women (Queen Consorts) that provided input into decisions being made. Modern day lobbyists have nothing on a queen that is sleeping with the king.

However, when you think about actual legislative bodies, in a democratic sense, that greatly reduces the numbers you can use throughout history.

When we think about wide spread democracy, it is actually a fairly recent invention, and normally came with some very specific rules around property ownership, power/wealth, etc.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-I

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_queens_regnant

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_queens_regnant

If you are arguing that woman have had more power or roughly equal power in most societies, you are absolutely wrong. You listed exceptions, as in exceptions to the rule, the rule being male dominance in human societies. And all of those exceptions come with a truckload or two of caveats.

> If you are arguing that woman have had more power or roughly equal power in most societies, you are absolutely wrong.

I would argue different power.

In warlike times (much of more antique history, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam) many of the powerful men were at home with the gear, while ordinary men were conscripted and dying/maimed on battlefields.

There has always been a pecking order of the powerful above the ordinary plebes, and powerful women have always been a part of the Optimati.

> You listed exceptions, as in exceptions to the rule, the rule being male dominance in human societies. And all of those exceptions come with a truckload or two of caveats.

I think there are more than a few exceptions, and you are dismissing them out of hand.

Just think about it - England, during its Golden Age, the most powerful kingdom in the West, was under a female monarch, during which time the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Spanish Armadas occured I would presume that is one prominent reason why English has become the Lingua Franca.

When people think of Egyptian Pharaohs, many would immediately think of Cleopatra, or Ramses II.

Russian history would be lost without an Empress Catherine.

Who was the Queen that authorized/sponsored Christopher Columbus on his Journey West, Isabella perhaps?

And, there is a much bigger list of important monarchs [1] of which only a few are noted.

> " In virtually all societies through all of history, this has not been the case."

Your words.

[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/powerful-women-rulers-everyone-sho...

are those historically validated or hypotheses? also matrilinearty doesnt have much to do with power, but with women as mothers like e.g. in sparta.

Those are historically validated [1], [2], [3]

Matrilineality has a great amount of power assocation/inheritance, since it if the men die off, and inheritance goes to a wife, there is little disincentive for war from a female perspective, and, potential more incentive. Imagine a warlike society with a divorce court where you know you will get 100%. If women control the assets, and inheritance flows through them, that is a great deal of power.

Furthermore, the ability to raise the future ruler is also the ability to influence that future rule, and comes with it frequently regency.

The idea of a powerless female nobility I do not find to be compatible with history.

After everything is said, we speak English.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/lycia/

[2] http://www.carlanayland.org/essays/picts_matrilineal_success...

[3] https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/601092/jewish...

While it's true that in some societies some women were in position power, it does not mean that woman as a class eschewed domination. IIRC in the Iroquois confederation, women were organized as one of society's pole, the economic domestic one, and had power in times of war because war needs the collaboration of the whole society. It is also hard to say if that they had always had that power or gained it during war times. In any case, they were/are statistically rare.

Also although many societies are matrilineal it does not means that the society is not male dominated. It is a sad conclusion of anthropology that the, often times ruthless, domination of women by men has been for a long time a constant of human history.

> While it's true that in some societies some women were in position power, it does not mean that woman as a class eschewed domination. IIRC in the Iroquois confederation, women were organized as one of society's pole, the economic domestic one, and had power in times of war because war needs the collaboration of the whole society. It is also hard to say if that they had always had that power or gained it during war times. In any case, they were/are statistically rare.

That is not correct.

> When the 5 nations needed to make a critical decision, such as going to war, they would decide via the Grand Council. Representatives of each clan called Sachems conducted the council meetings themselves.

> The Sachems were voted to their political positions by their designated Clan Mothers, the matrilineal hereditary leaders of their nations, and were perceived by the Haudenosaunee as sacred leaders. Women were seen as almost divine beings, albeit for practical reasons that aided their society’s survival.....

> Although the chiefs held most of the political power and day to day governance, the Clan Mother possessed the power to dismiss the chief if she and other Mothers felt he was doing a poor job.

> Chiefs handled civic matters, others took care of military operations, and Sachems acted as a Congress to vote on decisions for the Confederacy at the councils. Making the chiefs and sachems more akin to elected officials and not the monarchal leaders we often associate with today in indigenous culture. [1]

This shows that the role of the clan mothers was more similar to a permanent parliament that could form local executives (chiefs), dismiss them at will, and controlled the decision-making for the confederation by selecting representative decisionmakers for the grand council.

This has some similarities to the Italian style parliament, with permanent members dominating the government.

[1] https://historyhustle.com/iroquois/

Yes, and that was mostly due to biological factors combined with societal needs and the general repression of all genders outside of places of power.

E.g. why were female knights not common? Because knights were given land and in return were expected to answer their lord's summons. A woman that is pregnant cannot answer the summons and must send a delegate to lead her men. I hope I don't need to explain to you the drama and turmoil a no-show like that might lead to, both in military and political terms. Instead, the wives were (usually) the second in commands, and lorded over the lands in the absence of their husbands.

There's a theory that social aggreggation is driven by the behavior of males (who tend to socialize in large, shallow groups) rather than women (who tend to socialize 1-1)

In 1994 the leading Swedish party the Social Democrats made it their policy to have women on every other electable position. This policy obviously increased the number of female candidates the party fielded but, according to research, also increased the average competence level of the candidates. Contrary to common(?) wisdom, the competence of female candidates that took positions from male candidates were generally equal to or higher than the men that they replaced. Thus the fear that gender quotas that favor women in politics will decrease competence seem unfounded as it is contradicted by research. Furthermore, the research may also indicate that men has some inherent trait unrelated to their competence that gives them an advantage over women. Parties generally select their candidates through competitions and, on the local level, they often amount to nothing more than popularity contests... This process may be inherently biased against women.

The research is here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20160080 I'm sure anyone who frequents HN is able to find and read the full article online. Feel free to read it before criticizing. :) The authors define competence as a combination of educational attainment with income level compared to the mean. So it's a very crude metric, but similar metrics have been used to measure competence in other contexts.

The abstract doesn't say what you're saying. It says that the competence of men increased on average because the worst men got kicked out. Which is obviously what's going to happen. If you take a class of people and remove the bottom half, the average of the remaining people will necessarily be improved.

Isn't that... exactly the point?

No, the study doesn't even compare men and women. It compares men to men and women to women. It doesn't say anything at all about the competence of the newly added women compared to the competence of the kicked out men, since it has no absolute values of competence in the study. It just has deltas for men and deltas for women, so you can't compare.

So all we learned is that reducing the amount of positions available to men will kick out the less competent men first. We didn't learn whether the total competence of the group got increased after gender quotas compared to before.

You are absolutely right. It's not clear from the abstract whether there is a buried absolute comparison. The idea that the average of the group as a whole is raised seems so obvious I didn't even consider a reality where less competent men were replace by even less competent women.

Edit (oh look a full text article, I didn't expect to see a link so I assumed it was just an abstract link).

What it does say at least is that while the quota removed a fraction of men that turned out to be less competent than those that were removed, thereby improving the average competence of the remaining group of men, the added group of women did not have lower competence than the existing group (which would perhaps have been expected).

For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women.

Since men and women aren't compared in absolute terms, this doesn't mean there was an increase in competence either. But it does say that it wasn't a replacement of the group of low competence men (compared to their peers) with a group of low competence women (compared to their female peers). So that does suggest something (which the article does note), for example that the pool of competent women could be larger.

I'm a little confused by the conventions of this article (this isn't my field), but I think Table 4 on page 2226 and Figure 4 on page 2228 (and the surrounding text) are in fact looking at the total competence of the group before and after gender quotas.

The reason it is so strange is that it has different data for the men and women, they used among other things the military intelligence test which only men takes and income to measure competence. Income is definitely not a fair competence measure between men and women so you can't use that either, so it makes sense that they didn't compare competence directly.

So I am pretty sure that graph assumed that men and women had the same competence before, as the measures they had weren't comparable at all between the groups.

Given time and resources, that group of women will gain experience to be as performant as the group of men who have had centuries to learn how to do politics. Should that mean we need to allow underperforming persons in government? No - but it does mean being aware of the metric we are using. Great insight on this here:

https://www.euroscientist.com/a-ladder-made-for-men/

should be fairly obvious. There's no reason to assume the competence to govern differs significantly between the sexes (by definition a good democracy is representative), the fact that in many countries women constitute less than 20%-30% of representatives is obviously going to lower the performance of government.

Same observation could be made about age. If you installed a quota tomorrow to make government representative on that metric you'd eliminate a huge number of quasi zombies from power.

I know that quotas are a good idea for some people, but I believe the result would be absolute horrible. I though we would be wiser than this by now...

Conservatives are somehow more successful to bring women into politics than the "liberal" approach.

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