The Green Party’s leadership gender balancing rules aren’t fit for purpose
All elections in the Green Party are conducted by the single transferable vote method of proportional representation. This voting form is fairly simple and allows you to put your preferences for candidates, but our gender balancing rules are a lot more complex.
Prior to 2014, the singular deputy leader had to be of a different gender to the leader. In 2014 this changed as two deputy leaders were elected, who were required to be of different genders. In this case it was Amelia Womack and Sharar Ali.
Since 2014, the Green Party of England and Wales constitution was amended to read that when one leader was elected the following happens:
4.‘The post of deputy leader will be held as a job share with two individuals of a different gender, noting that gender is self determined.
In addition: ‘Two members of a different gender may together stand for the office of leader in order to hold the post as a jobshare…In this case a single deputy, the individual who polls the highest vote, regardless of gender, will be elected’
As a result of this, if we have a single leader then two deputies will be elected – who cannot be the same gender. Here are two examples of how this affects the results:
Example of results with female leader
Leadership election:
1st place female candidate elected leader
Deputy Leadership Election:
1st place female candidate, elected deputy leader
2nd place female candidate, not elected
3rd place female candidate, not elected
4th place male, elected deputy leader
5th place non-binary, not elected
If the 4th and 5th placed candidates were switched, then the non-binary candidate would be elected as the second deputy leader, as opposed to the male candidate. The rules apply in the same way for all genders.
Example of results with male leader
Leadership Election:
1st place male candidate elected Leader
Deputy Leadership Election:
1st place female candidate, elected deputy leader
2nd place female candidate, not elected
3rd place female candidate, not elected
4th place male, elected deputy leader
5th place non-binary, not elected
If two co-leaders are elected then only one deputy leader will be elected, which is whoever gets the most votes.
Why should it be changed?
Electing a second deputy automatically due to them being male seems contrary to the purpose of gender balancing. We do gender balancing because of the lack of political representation of women and other gender minorities, but the current system fails to take this into account effectively.
At one time it looked as though Nick Humberstone would be automatically elected were Rosemary Sexton to become leader. This was because at that time Nick was the only candidate who was not a woman standing for deputy. In response to this, Nick stated that “That isn’t democracy”, and that he would vote to re-open nominations were he to be the only candidate. Fortunately, other candidates stepped forward soon after.
Nonetheless, we are still left in an awkward position were Rosemary Sexton to become leader. As the example of results with a female leader demonstrates, this would create the very real possibility of the top two candidates being female and the second not getting elected because of the current gender balancing system.
While this system does take into account minority gender identities, such as non-binary and trans people, it also doesn’t account for race. In fact, under the current system this deputy leadership election could exclude Cleo Lake who is the only black woman standing for deputy. Currently, no political party in the UK with representation in parliament has had a black woman as leader or deputy and yet under this system we could actively deny this from happening.
This system unjustly pits Cleo Lake against Tom Pashby, the only non-binary candidate standing in this election who has also called out the inequality of this system, saying that the rules “effectively limit” the number of women and non-binary people in leadership positions. Whilst it is possible that both can get elected, the fact is that the current system is pitting different liberation groups against one another. Evidently, this is unjust and we should focus on changing this system because it is broken.
Upon hearing about how this gender balancing system worked, Cleo Lake spoke exclusively with Bright Green, stating:
There are a significant number of new members who have recently joined and who may not be able to get their head round the various election outcome implications. Politics is full of jargon and systems at times that can make things confusing particularly to people who are new to a political party. Of course I really hope that the membership generally, will vote for me to be the change that is needed in terms of African heritage / black representation on the leadership, but besides that I also worry that voters who do not understand the process might feel cheated somehow.
Image credit: YouTube screen grab
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Gender balance apart, is it right that certain candidates are paying for advertising on Facebook to get themselves elected in this month’s internals? Leadership/Lords nomination/ TU liaison.
Speaking for myself, this goes against all my principles, money being used to buy votes.
As an aside, all the adverts I have seen come from males.
its complicated because its not easy to come to a balance on things like this…. i would say this.. what ever the rules are going to be they should not be changed again for at least twenty years however imperfect they are..every time you change something it disadvantages someone particularly as you can predict the future. what seems fair to today may seem unfair after it plays out. But the ultimate unfairness is to keep changing the rules before anyone has got used to them.
The Green party has only had a leader and deputy since 2007 and it does annoy me that the rules keep been changed as it means they are never bedding down to be reviewed over time.
One easy solution if you ask me would be to hold the deputy leader election after the leader election. Or let the leader pick there deputy…..
This would mean that no deputy leader could win with less votes than another as you could simply exclude men in the even of a shahrar ali being elected.
By way Working class green endorses Shahrar Ali.first pref…and Rosi SExton secon pref. Enough is enough and its time for a change.
The easiest way to deal with the gender balancing issue is to abolish the requirement for gender balancing altogether, so that the election result for leader does not affect the election result for deputy leader.
Just to say – the party doesn’t use STV for leadership elections – because STV is a method of electing to *multiple* seats in a single election, and these elections are largely for single seats. STV as a methodology does not become a proportional system until it is electing to 4 or more seats.
In the context of the leadership elections, it is barely better than first past the post.
The history of this is also worth noting – in 2012, Natalie Bennett was elected, and not one but two deputy leader candidates who won the most and second most votes absolutely were skipped over by the electoral system to elect Will Duckworth. This is what led to the changes in Autumn 2013.
The changes proposed to the Brighton Conference in Autumn 2013 were three separate approaches to the deputy leadership. The first was that there would be no gender balancing rules – proposed by Rupert Read, this did not include the provision to increase the number of deputy leaders. In contrast to this, Sarah Cope, organise through Green Party Women proposed that there would be limitations on the number of people who self-defined as men in the leadership – but that there would only be a leader and a deputy leader. These two options were the only ones which appeared in the first agenda, by the final agenda, Caroline Allen (one of the people passed over by the system in 2012) had proposed an amendment which proposed the system which we have now.
The reason why the Allen amendment passed, is arguably because there was no 2/3rds majority for the first two options, but there was an appetite for change. This meant that it came to the final option and people voted for that. SOC had taken the decision to order them in order of what was furthest away from the status quo first – no gender balance – then the Green Party women version, then Caroline Allens amendment last. It is possible, that if they had been in a different order, then it would have been a different outcome.
This bit of history is useful for teaching 2 things – the system we use for making decisions works ok the choice is between the status quo and a new thing, but bad for anything more, and the order in which decisions are put impacts the outcome (there is lots of choice aggregation theory jargon we could discuss in here…). The second bit of learning is that there is a tendency to pick the slightly more complicated fudge options – but then live to become dissatisfied with these – this is a thing in the party generally. We should stop doing that.