GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND WOMEN’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION: A STUDY OF WOMEN IN THE QUEENSLAND LABOR PARTY

This thesis focuses on the political representation of women. It is concerned with the extent to which gender is a relevant factor in political representation. In in-depth interviews, fifty grassroots women members of the Queensland Labor Party participating in this study described their thoughts and feelings about a range of issues relating to the representation of women. The women were recruited through use of ‘snowball’ or ‘network’ sampling and represented a range of ages, backgrounds, party roles/ affiliations, and lengths of party membership. All lived in Southeast Queensland and were members of local party branches. Participants’ tape-recorded interviews were transcribed and the software package known as NUD.IST was used in the analysis of data. All the women interviewed agreed that there are both social and party ‘barriers’ to women’s political participation and most supported affirmative action and equal opportunity programs as strategies with the potential to achieve more gender-balanced parliaments, though there was little conviction that more women in politics would necessarily result in improved parliamentary behaviours or more women-friendly policy outcomes. While most participants agreed that there are ‘women’s interests’, only half were of the opinion that the substantive representation of women should be the particular responsibility of female representatives. Most participants also disagreed that women can only be properly represented by women, and there was a view that in some instances some men may represent women better than some women. Though all the participants had agreed that there should be more women in parliaments, mainly as a matter of justice, very few of the fifty women interviewed said gender would be their deciding factor in preselection ballots, most rather basing their choice of candidate on a range of criteria perceived as defining merit, or the best person for the job. Apart from a tendency to a more pragmatic attitude to politics and policies among long-term party members, no consistent attitudinal trends relating to demographic indicators were discerned among participants