Note: This post refers to a motion from NUS National Conference 2013, also numbered 701. Some of what’s said isn’t relevant to 701 and 701 at Conference 2014, but the main ideas remain the same.
This week, delegates at NUS National Conference will be asked to vote on Gender Balancing various aspects of future Conferences (Motion 701 in the Final Proposals). The basic premise is that women are underrepresented within NUS (fairly uncontentious) and that a 50% lower-bound on Women at Conference, in the Block of 15 (“Ordinary Members” on the National Executive (NEC)), and representing Zone Committees on NEC is the way to start fixing it (more contentious).
Here’s a sad fact: Women lose elections because they’re women. That isn’t to say that women never win elections. Nor is it to say that no woman has ever lost an election because she was a bad candidate (or even won one in spite of it). It isn’t the only spurious barrier to good candidates winning elections, or even necessarily the most prevalent. However, it’s a barrier that affects roughly half of all students, and one which can potentially be removed with little effort.
[ Note: I say “roughly” half, because no reliable data representing the true breadth of gender within post-16 education exists. 50%+ is a fair guess, but once you add further decimal places you’re basically making it up as you go along ]
While student officers of all genders would love to believe that we were best candidate for the jobs that we’ve held, it’s rare. We’re often convinced that we’re the best candidate running – we’d withdraw if we weren’t – but it’s hard to argue that from a student body of tens of thousands that there wouldn’t be someone else who might at least give us a run for our money. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. So what if someone else could do it? We’re the ones who are doing it – and we’re doing it very well, even if we say so ourselves.
Likewise, we’d love to believe that we won entirely on our own merit. We’d be kidding ourselves, of course. It’s rare that a candidate wins primarily on their own merit, never mind entirely. I’ve won elections through name recognition and social capital. I’ve lost them through lack of disabled access and transphobia. I’ve lost them through sexism. No organisation’s election procedures come close to solving these problems, not least due to the one factor you can’t legislate for – the electorate. While there is sexism on our campuses, there is sexism in our democracy.
Clearly something needs to be done. But is this it? The tactical effectiveness of quotas have been discussed elsewhere. My only contribution to that discussion is that if anyone has a serious alternative, it needs to be presented and implemented quickly. If it isn’t something we can vote on this year, it needs to be something that we can take back to our campuses and start work on next week. The growth of the Disabled Students’ Campaign continues to be restricted successive years of stalling on increased delegation size – we can’t still be discussing vital questions about the current state of our movement in three years time.
So now that I’ve commended the need for something to be done, here comes the difficult part – setting out the problems that the current proposal does bring with it. It’s been acknowledged that NUS, and the Women’s Campaign in particular, has (in principle) an inclusive understanding of gender that goes beyond the male/female binary. This doesn’t however mean that a 50% quota is unproblematic by mere virtue of NUS operating it.
Let’s assume for a minute (illustratively, if completely ludicrously) that gender is the only axis along which students struggle to access their unions. Take a delegation of 6 students, with a 50% quota. The first 3 places in the delegation are (as is inevitable at the University of Exemplar Misogyny Students Union) taken by men. The candidate who comes 4th in the ballot is not a man, but nor are they a woman. That candidate experiences street harassment, struggles with access to reproductive healthcare, and has to study part time because of their caring responsibilities. 3 women delegates are sent to conference ahead of them. From a position of challenging a normative male dominance of Conference, this is perhaps something of a pathological case.
Prior to the Revolution (which we’ve heard numerous speeches against calling for at Conference today), there will always be a cut-off point at which a candidate who faces structural oppression will lose out to another candidate who faces fewer barriers and brings a perhaps more privileged and normative set of experiences to Conference. However, by setting a “perfect” lower bound on Women’s participation, we risk establishing two parallel elections – 3 positions for privileged men, 3 positions for privileged women. Depending on our individual campuses, this probably constitutes an improvement, but it’s one that comes with new, different barriers. It’s not an unequivocal dealbreaker, but it’s one that we must adopt quotas with full knowledge of.
Within NUS, it’s true that our Women’s Campaign has a very open definition of woman. However, for students who have struggled for several years (or are still struggling) to throw off that label, it’s unacceptable that they should have to adopt it for electoral expediency. We accept that our students should not have to label themselves to use the bathroom – nor should they have to to engage with our democracy.
However progressive (whatever that means) we are within our own Conferences and elections, NUS procedure cannot control for individual campuses and electorates. This is where the 50% figure becomes particularly problematic. Whatever the ideal within our feminist, trans friendly utopia, a 50% quota on the overwhelming majority of our campuses will be seen as a 50% Men, 50% Women dividing line. Under the male/female binary that pervades our society, a 50% lower bound on participation by a group that is seen as making up roughly 50% of the electorate will in turn operate as a 50% cap. However well intended, the introduction of quotas in terms of 1/2, 50%, or halves, in a discussion with two dominant groups symbolises and reifies a binary.
So what does this mean for binary trans people? I won’t speak for trans men any more than I can speak for all trans women, but from prior experience of reserved place elections, it worries me. For women early in transition, or those with a developing understanding of their political oppression as women, there is of course the personal difficulty of whether or not to adopt that label. For those like myself who are confident in their identity, there are further difficulties.
As a trans woman, do I throw my lot in with the open ballot and risk damaging my chances by not declaring my identity and losing out to another woman with fewer votes? Worse, do I lose out as a woman who has transgressed the boundary of our reserved allocation and encroached upon the unspoken 50% quota for those who aren’t Women? Conversely, do I affirm my identity and lose out to the internalised cissexism that sees me as woman in the sense that I am insufficiently male, but simultaneously as insufficiently female when it comes to occupying a place that has been created for the specific benefit of women?
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Not only does it play out in access to public services and private spaces, it plays out every term in our elections to SU committees, Officer roles, and liberation Conferences. Whatever the situation within our Campaigns and in the most enlightened of our Unions, this is the dilemma that trans women across the country face when engaging with student democracy. While procedural measures may have a net positive effect, we need to be completely clear about the fact that any complication of rules entrenches the participation of those of us who are practiced at factional horse-trading and whose mental and physical health is suitably disposed to continuing to navigate that system.
Clearly now wouldn’t be the time to put forward an entirely new and unique proposal, even if the mechanics of conference made it possible. So what can we do with the policy that we have on the table? My personal feeling is that quotas should not be abandoned. They provide a concrete direction that we can take now, in time for our next conference. However, after much consideration (this post has taken me a literal week of reading, conversations and drafting to write) and with reluctance as to how my arguments may be adopted by those whose politics cares only for my conclusion and not the reasoning, I don’t think that the proposal as a whole should stand.
The way to achieve this at Conference is the Parts procedure. Accordingly, I would suggest the following:
- Remove the recommendation for Zone Committees. Even better, remove Zone Committees entirely – but that’s a discussion for 702a. Denying students with a diverse set of gendered experiences the ability to run for an NEC place because (as is overwhelmingly likely) a man won an election in which they had no stake is a tactical mistake, and holds students of non-binary genders culpable for the workings of the patriarchy by denying them the opportunity to even stand. Placing a binary stipulation (Women only, unless…) upon two dependent elections will only serve to uphold a binary outcome. (Note: this is *not* the same as a Women’s and Open Place election run in parallel)
- Remove the recommendation for individual delegations. This is the most difficult one, and the one that I’m least sure about. For the reasons outlined above, I don’t believe that we can currently reach an adequate compromise on individual campuses. While I don’t want to fuss about numbers, I do think that a quota short of 50% may achieve our goals while minimising the problems I’ve outlined.
- Keep the recommendation for the Block of 15 (NEC). The reality of elections at Conference more accurately reflects the ideals that we hold as a National Union than we can uniformly achieve across our individual campuses. The size of the election also minimises the potential for statistical anomalies of the kind that I’ve outlined for smaller delegations. For these reasons, I believe that introducing the quota for NEC serves to solve more problems than it creates.
Obviously the parts procedure introduces additional complexity to an already technical discussion, but I genuinely believe that the debate – and the eventual solution – would benefit from separate consideration of the different quotas that are being proposed. Don’t wait for another delegate to propose parts, please consider moving them yourself – and if those parts can’t be considered, on balance, vote Yes to 701.
Useful Nuisance 