Women Arrive in the Parliamentary Workplace

Abstract

Despite achieving the right to stand for parliament, women’s role as wife and mother was expected to largely preclude political ambitions. Parliaments resisted the presence of women, even as Hansard reporters, although out of public view they filled administrative roles in the offices of parliamentarians and ministers. Politics remained a ‘two-person career’, with wives expected to contribute unpaid political support for their husbands, as well as managing family and household. The eventual inflow of younger women into parliament in the 1990s (in Australia, after the adoption of party quotas) led to a struggle to convert a masculine institution into a family-friendly one. Babies in the chamber could no longer be treated as ‘strangers’ and parental leave and childcare were needed. Women took on prominent roles in ministers’ offices, though such positions of influence could be perilous. This chapter tracks changing perspectives on the social expectations, organisational practices and institutional norms that served to exclude women from political careers or to constrain their contribution once they had arrived in parliament.

The political mobilisation of women to achieve women’s suffrage was eventually successful, first in New Zealand in 1893 and in many countries following World War 1. It did not, however, guarantee the presence of women in parliament, something that even many suffragists were ambivalent about at the time. Before the renewed mobilisation of women in the 1970s, the absence of women from public life was assumed by political scientists, as well as the general public, to be largely inevitable.

While in a formal sense, women had won equal citizenship, their primary obligations as citizens were construed as being in the private rather than the public realm. Because of their roles as wives and mothers, their citizenship duties would be performed largely in the home. Such beliefs long constrained the entry of women into political careers as well as into other public roles—the struggle for women’s jury service took even longer than the struggle for political rights.

Belief that women’s primary obligations lay in the home meant they were available to perform support roles for husbands engaged in public life. Thanks to wives, the normative parliamentarian was not burdened with caring responsibilities when they achieved elected office. This meant that parliaments did not need to accommodate such responsibilities in their institutional arrangements or become ‘family friendly’.¹ This chapter tracks changing perspectives on the social expectations, organisational practices and institutional norms that served to exclude women from political careers or to constrain their contribution once they had arrived in parliament.

Suffrage and Beyond

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the primary concern of suffragists was to ensure that women gained the power of the vote. They believed that armed with the vote, women would be able to influence social policy. As part of the struggle for the vote in the United Kingdom (UK), suffragist publications stressed the connection between women’s suffrage and progressive social legislation in Australia and New Zealand, including old-age pensions, pure food and child protection Acts.²

However, although women’s non-party organisations sought to mobilise the power of women’s votes, it was party loyalty that largely determined voting. In terms of actually standing for parliament, both entrenched party norms and the family roles ascribed to women were to prove a long-lasting barrier. Critics, including political scientists, associated political aspirations on the part of women with neglect of their more primary duties of caring for husbands and families. Robert E. Lane, later President of the American Political Science Association, wrote that interest in politics moved women from their proper role and sphere of competence and meant borrowing time and attention from their children.³

Nonetheless, feminists seized the opportunities provided by the creation of new transnational bodies to promote women’s political rights. In the 1950s the United Nations (UN) and its Commission on the Status of Women developed a new Convention for this purpose—the UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women, which sought to guarantee women’s rights to be eligible for election.

In conjunction with the new Convention, the UN Commission on the Status of Women initiated the first cross-national survey research on women’s political participation. While the research leader, Maurice Duverger, believed this to be a serious subject, many of the political scientists asked to provide information did not. The absence of women was often justified by the argument that politics was by its nature a field essentially suited to men, and women themselves tended to accept ‘the secondary place to which they are still assigned’.⁴

Although Australia had been the first of the Westminster countries to grant the right of women to both vote and stand for the national parliament, it was the last to ratify the Convention on the Political Rights of Women. This was because Article III required that women be entitled to hold public office and to exercise public functions on equal terms with men. Australia could not meet these requirements because of the public service marriage bar (which lasted much longer than in Canada, New Zealand or the UK), the gender pay gap and restrictions in relation to jury service.

Even the Australian Constitution has been found to conspire against women’s presence in the parliament. Section 44 (iv) bars those who hold ‘any office of profit under the Crown’ from standing for election. This has been interpreted as excluding public sector employees such as teachers, nurses or other public servants from eligibility, all occupations where women are the majority of employees.⁵ In 1992 the High Court found that a school teacher on unpaid leave from the Victorian teaching service was ineligible for election to the Australian Parliament. Public sector employees have to resign before nominating to be a candidate, despite the risks involved. The discriminatory nature of this provision has been recognised but Constitutional change in Australia is very difficult to achieve.

A Masculine Domain

The Westminster parliaments remained a masculine domain for a surprisingly long period, as we can see from examining both the actors in the parliamentary workplace and the institutional settings. There was resistance to the employment of women and they only became more visible in the parliamentary workforce in the 1970s. For example, women were not considered for the role of Hansard reporter even when it became increasingly difficult to find men with the required shorthand speeds and there was an abundance of women with such skills. Once they had done their ‘turn’ in the chamber, male reporters dictated their notes to female typists out of sight of the chamber.

In Australia this began to change in 1958, when a woman was first appointed as a Hansard reporter in the Western Australian Parliament. However, presiding officers in the upper and lower houses controlled what women reporters could wear and they were not allowed to wear trousers until ‘trouser-gate’ in 1994, when women parliamentarians wearing pants suits were able to object to this treatment of staff.⁶ At the federal level, the first woman was appointed as a Hansard reporter in 1969. Hansard reporters had traditionally been recruited from among male journalists but, as fewer became available with the necessary shorthand speeds, the field was extended to court reporters and—eventually—women.⁷

Other Westminster parliaments had moved a little earlier, with the UK House of Commons appointing a woman, Jean Winder, as a Hansard reporter as early as 1944. However, the UK Hansard Editor said: ‘The only reason I thought of appointing a woman was that I was unable to find a man’. She undertook a long battle for equal pay, a battle she finally won with the help of Irene Ward MP in 1954.⁸ The Canadian House of Commons appointed its first woman Hansard reporter in 1957 while the New Zealand Parliament appointed two women as Hansard reporters in 1962. These were the first steps in a dramatic sex change in this occupational group, a sex change that had taken place many decades earlier outside parliament. In a valedictory speech continuing the concern with gender-appropriate clothing, the Hon Warren Freer commented:

I congratulate the Editor of Hansard on what appears to be a female takeover of a very old institution. I, for one, am grateful that all the men have been replaced by attractive women who come in here and, with their attractive clothing, brighten the sombre scene of Parliament.⁹

In Australia, Hansard reporters also became predominantly female, making up 35 of the 45 reporters (now called editors) in the Australian Parliament in 2023. The press gallery was another parliamentary institution changing gender, as discussed in Chap. 4. It has travelled a long way from its earlier history as part of a masculine domain. In New Zealand, the first woman admitted to the press gallery, in 1965, had to agree not to take advantage of the gallery’s bar privileges.¹⁰

Women’s absence from parliamentary chambers was ‘over-determined’, owing much to the expectations involved in legislative recruitment but also to the norms built into parliamentary institutions. For example, the distance between Government and Opposition in Westminster parliaments is supposedly two swords lengths—symbolising the expectation that men would put aside their swords to engage in the cut and thrust of verbal debate. The Serjeant-at-Arms (Sergeant-at-Arms in Canada) who assisted the Speaker in maintaining order, was historically the only person authorised to wear a sword inside parliament. Lyn Simons became the first woman Serjeant-at-Arms in the Commonwealth in 1984, with New Zealand following in 1985.

As we shall see in the next chapter, reference to the two-swords length has been used to normalise adversarial behaviour in the chamber. This contest occurs in a public space where female bodies and their reproductive roles were not expected to intrude.¹¹ The few women who were elected received reminders that they were ‘out of place’ and found it difficult even to find a toilet—in the Australian Parliament, Members’ toilets were for men only until 1974 (and even later in the UK).

When women did succeed in entering the political arena they tended at first to be those who were not, or who had ceased to be, childbearing. The fact that they did not bring babies with them made it easier to treat them as honorary men—enabling ‘women who do become Members of Parliament to be absorbed into the political body while preserving its masculinity’.¹² Women were expected to do the adapting to fit into a masculine institution with all its unstated but understood ground rules, rather than the institution adapting to meet their needs.

While the first women parliamentarians might be treated as honorary men in some respects, they were still expected to perform appropriate gender roles, for example specialising in welfare or social policy committees and pouring the tea rather than drinking beer with their male colleagues. Parliaments had members’ and non-members’ bars but women were rarely welcome in them. In the Australian Parliament there was a heavy drinking culture and the non-members’ bar was male-only until 1970, with women confined to a shut-off corner called the ‘brown room’ served via a hatch from the bar.¹³ Similarly in New Zealand it was 1971 before women staffers, press gallery and Hansard reporters were allowed into the bar.¹⁴ In the UK, women’s informal exclusion from the bars and smoking rooms of the House of Commons meant that ministers had been reluctant for most of the twentieth century to accept women in the career-enhancing position of principal private secretary. Bars were places to pick up gossip and information useful to the minister, and informal barriers to women’s presence in them was a career disadvantage.¹⁵

In the case of the Australian Parliament, the eventual replacement of a bar by a childcare centre was seen as highly symbolic of gender-sensitive change. It was referred to as such by the Australian delegation at the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Assembly in Québec City in 2012, when the IPU Plan of Action for Gender-Friendly Parliaments was adopted. It had taken years of campaigning—from 1983 to 2009—to gain the childcare centre, even though a new Parliament House had been opened in 1988 with a snooker room, squash courts, a swimming pool and a meditation room. As was noted by the Leader of the House when moving the motion for construction of the childcare centre, one difference between the childcare centre and the rest of Parliament House was that there would be no division bells that might wake babies, only the usual clocks with flashing red or green lights to alert parents who might be at the centre.¹⁶

The campaigns to convert the infrastructure of parliaments from that of masculine clubs took a similar form in many Westminster parliaments, with the billiard rooms—once standard—often being a bone of contention. Two billiard tables in the Australian Parliament were sold in 2010, a year after the opening of the childcare centre. In the Tasmanian Parliament, Green parliamentarians had also zeroed in on the anomaly of a parliament having two bars and a billiards room but no childcare centre, while the Western Australian parliament finally donated their billiards tables to Edith Cowan University (named after Australia’s first woman parliamentarian) in 2022 after a period of loaning them out.¹⁷

The Two-Person Career

In the 1970s the gendered biases of legislative recruitment became part of the renewed feminist critique of male-dominated politics. For example, attention was drawn to the nature of politics as a two-person career—the kind of career in which a wife is needed to contribute to the occupational performance of the husband.¹⁸ In politics this could include constituency work and public functions; sometimes political parties interviewed wives as well as male candidates for preselection, to see how suitable they were for the performance of these functions. A New Zealand backbencher wrote for the journal Political Science about how wives continued ‘the duty of a Parliamentary Member’ when the MP was away at Parliament in Wellington. He referred to the unpaid constituency work performed by his wife, in addition to attending to his correspondence, looking after the family and doing research for him.¹⁹

Husbands were not regarded as likely to perform such functions for a female candidate. Legislative recruitment was affected not only by this assumption but also by the failure of political parties and parliamentary arrangements to accommodate the caring responsibilities that women were expected to perform. Instead, these responsibilities were expected to generally preclude political careers. This was a self-fulfilling assumption as the evolution of the ‘full-time dedication norm’ for politicians affected how legislative work was organised and required availability for late-night sittings.²⁰

Turning to Australia, fifty years after the naming of the ‘two-person career’, journalist Annabel Crabb described the significant advantage for politicians of having a spouse to manage the household and support constituency commitments and campaigns. She argued that even today this advantage was enjoyed by vastly more men than women. While some men were now performing the supportive spouse role in a two-person career, it wasn’t always easy. When Anna Burke (later Speaker) became the second woman in the House of Representatives to have a baby, her husband, an intensive care paramedic, applied for parental leave. His application to the ambulance service received a hostile response, as he was ‘the first bloke who had ever asked for it’. Protracted negotiation was needed before he got the 12-months leave that enabled him to look after the baby and have Burke paged by the parliamentary switchboard when she needed to breast feed.²¹

While younger male politicians are now more likely to have an active role in caring for children, the carer role still weighs more heavily on women and it is often difficult to combine caring responsibilities and a political career.²² Unsurprisingly, in the Australian Parliament elected in 2013 women averaged only 1.2 children, compared with their male colleagues who averaged 2.1. This difference is very similar to that found in the UK House of Commons in the same year.²³

The difficulties of balancing parliamentary work and family responsibilities are particularly evident where long distances and plane journeys are involved, such as for Australian politicians representing Western Australian electorates in the federal parliament.²⁴ Even when politicians are Perth-based rather than coming from a rural electorate, the flight to Canberra takes about four hours to cover over 3000 kilometres. In 2018 Labor frontbencher Tim Hammond, Member for Perth, resigned after only two years in parliament saying he couldn’t continue with a job taking him so far from his baby and young children; no women with young babies have attempted it.

The stresses of the ‘fly in fly out’ nature of sittings in the Australian federal parliament, particularly for those with caring responsibilities, have led to calls for technological solutions. Many suggest that greater use of digital technology for remote participation could ease the strains of long-distance commuting. Standing orders for both the House of Representatives and the Senate allow for the use of ‘electronic communication’ to hold virtual committee hearings and it has been suggested that there be further encouragement of virtual participation.²⁵ While provision was introduced during the Covid lockdowns for remote participation in chamber debate as well as committee hearings, this did not extend to remote voting as in the Canadian House of Commons, where there have been calls for a hybrid model to become permanent.²⁶

We should finish here by noting that the concept of a ‘two-person career’ is different from recent proposals for job-sharing the role of parliamentary representative. These proposals, both in the UK and Australia, are intended to facilitate the balancing of paid work and care in parliamentary careers rather than their division between parliamentarian and spouse.²⁷

Quotas, Critical Mass and ‘Making a Difference’

In the 1990s, the participation of women in public decision-making and the presence of women in parliament was at last put firmly on the international agenda by the Beijing Platform for Action adopted by 189 countries at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on women.²⁸ The participation of women in public decision-making became a measure of democracy and the IPU’s ranking of national parliaments by the representation of women became an important tool in democracy assessment.

The concept of ‘critical mass’ also took wing across the world. The concept (originally borrowed from physics) was that women not only needed to be present but present in sufficient numbers before they could have the desired transformative effect on political institutions. In 1997 the concept of critical mass was given authoritative form by the treaty body responsible for oversight of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). It appeared in the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendation on Article 7 of the Convention:

Research demonstrates that if women’s participation reaches 30 to 35 percent (generally termed a ‘critical mass’), there is a real impact on political style and the content of decisions, and political life is revitalized.²⁹

The concept of critical mass was very effective in mobilising support for gender electoral quotas among women’s party organisations and advocacy networks at home and abroad. Multilateral standard-setting institutions such as International IDEA took on a monitoring role and provided guidance on best practice in making quotas effective.

By 2020 over 130 countries had adopted some form of gender electoral quota. Whereas there had been a rapid drop globally in the parliamentary representation of women at the beginning of the 1990s, there was now a slow but steady increase, even if subject to fluctuations at the national level. In Australia, the Labor Party’s adoption in 1994 of a mandatory quota for preselections led to women forming over 50 per cent of the federal parliamentary party by 2022, including an increased number of non-European and Indigenous women. The quota was initially 35 per cent of winnable seats but was increased in 2012 and 2015. The conservative Coalition parties continued to oppose quotas despite public opinion being increasingly in favour and women formed less than 30 per cent of their party rooms after the 2022 federal election.

As encapsulated in the concept of critical mass, one of the important factors driving mobilisation over quotas was the belief that if only women entered parliament in sufficient numbers they would make a difference. There was often an expectation that women’s family roles would translate into an approach to politics based more on consultation and consensus seeking and less on power-broking and head kicking: it was believed the presence of more women would reduce the level of aggression found in Westminster parliaments where two teams face off against each other.

In Australia in 1994 a clear majority of voters agreed with the proposition that the increased presence of women would improve parliamentary behaviour.³⁰ However existing norms of parliamentary conduct render it difficult for women to perform effectively and make the hoped-for difference. As Janine Haines, the first woman leader of a parliamentary party in Australia said, it is hard to run onto the pitch playing soccer when everybody else is playing rugby. The persistence of these informal rules is exacerbated by the televising of parliament and privileging of the drama of confrontational politics by the electronic media.

The Struggle to Make Parliaments Family Friendly

While the presence of women did not make an immediate difference to parliamentary practices, the inflow of younger women from the 1990s did bring pressure to accommodate the realities of reproduction and child rearing. One example concerns whether infants can be present in parliamentary chambers. Under traditional Westminster rules, ‘strangers’—people who are neither elected members nor parliamentary officials—are not allowed on the floor of the chamber, a rule originally intended to keep out the monarch. By 1989 the term ‘stranger’ was replaced by the term ‘visitor’ in the standing orders of the Australian Senate, while the Australian House of Representatives and the UK House of Commons followed in 2004.

The issue remained of whether infants being breastfed would be removed, whether as ‘strangers’ or ‘visitors’. Given the promotion of breastfeeding as a public health measure, there was uproar over a case in the Victorian Parliament in 2003, when a baby being breastfed by a Labor MP was treated as breaching the rule and the MP was asked to leave the chamber. To pre-empt a similar occurrence in the Australian Senate, and following a motion from young Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, an exemption from the prohibition of visitors on the floor of the chamber was introduced into the standing orders in 2003 for a ‘Senator breastfeeding an infant’.

In 2009, however, the President of the Senate ruled that a two-year-old toddler carried in for a vote by Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young should be removed and the child was carried out crying. At the time, the majority of the Senate Procedure Committee decided it would be undesirable to extend the breastfeeding exemption to cover Senators caring for infants because the scope might be too broad. The standing orders were finally amended in 2016 to add an exemption to the prohibition on ‘visitors’ for a ‘Senator caring for an infant briefly’.

The Australian House of Representatives adopted a different approach to breastfeeding. In 2008 its standing orders were amended to allow nursing mothers to vote in divisions by proxy—giving their vote to the relevant party whip. However, in 2015 the Chief Government Whip was unaware of the provision for proxy voting introduced under the previous Labor Government (a good example of remembering the old and forgetting the new). There was a furore when he advised a government frontbencher to consider expressing more milk after she missed a division due to breastfeeding.³¹

The Procedure Committee of the House of Representatives subsequently recommended more adequate provision for infants, deciding that as fathers were increasingly involved in the care of their infants, both male and female members caring for infants should be able to bring them into the chamber. This went beyond the Senate’s provision for breastfeeding and specifically included bottle feeding.³² The House of Representatives standing orders were amended accordingly in 2016 to specify that ‘a visitor does not include an infant being cared for by a member’. Transformation was happening, although perhaps not as fast as in the New Zealand House of Representatives where the Speaker was seen holding and feeding members’ children while presiding over parliamentary debates.³³

In addition to recommending provisions for fathers, the Australian House of Representatives Procedure Committee noted the World Health Organisation recommendation that babies be exclusively breast-fed until six months. Given the role of parliamentarians made it difficult for them to take extended leave, there was a need to support members to continue to breastfeed after they returned to work. Meanwhile, in 2019, Greens Senator Larissa Waters became the first Senator to breastfeed in the Chamber and the first to do so while proposing a motion. Breastfeeding in the once masculine domain of parliament continued to be newsworthy but no longer a cause for exclusion.

The question of parental leave remains a difficult one for parliamentarians given their role as elected representatives, and it is rare for them to have the same leave entitlements as other citizens. In Australia, the 2021 Review of Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces suggested that to better accommodate the needs of parents and carers ‘good practice parental leave entitlements’ be extended to parliamentarians. At present standing orders require that the relevant chamber vote on a motion requesting leave for a specified purpose and length of time, rather than it being an entitlement. The Parliamentary Library found that the 13 MPs recorded as taking maternity leave between 1999 and 2016 took an average leave of 5.6 sitting weeks.³⁴ The first MP to give birth while an MP, Ros Kelly, famously came back to parliament with an air cushion one week after giving birth to her first child in 1983. In New Zealand, Whetu Tirikatene Sullivan had similarly returned to parliament less than two weeks after a caesarean birth in 1970, anxious that she should not disrupt parliamentary proceedings.

In Australia it is now suggested that as well as making clear that a base level of parental leave is an entitlement, such leave should automatically trigger an entitlement for the other side to provide a pair if a Government or Opposition member were involved.³⁵ In the case of the 13 MPs who took maternity leave in 1999–2016, the granting of pairs was very inconsistent, with no pairs granted in 2006–2007. If an MP on leave comes back into the chamber, their leave automatically comes to an end. In New Zealand the introduction in 1996 of party voting via party whips has made this issue easier to resolve through the provision of proxy votes to those on compassionate leave during the first six months of a child’s life or ‘evening leave’ during the first 12 months.³⁶

Proxy voting has also been introduced in the UK for MPs with new-born children. Nonetheless, parliamentarians who give birth while in office need great resilience to deal with both physical and emotional demands. The first Australian Senator to give birth, Jacinta Collins, experienced little sympathy if she missed a division because of her baby: ‘The Black Rod at the time instructed security guards to deny me access if I had [the baby] with me’.³⁷ In the ACT Legislative Assembly, Katy Gallagher (later Chief Minister) was accused of being ‘a part-time minister’ when she returned from six weeks maternity leave bringing her baby to work.³⁸

One ongoing issue in Australia concerns so-called ‘family reunion’ travel to cover, for example, travel by a spouse or carer and a dependent child to Canberra (see the discussion above of the problems posed by long-distance commuting). The travel entitlements of parliamentarians are always controversial, contributing to popular perceptions of politicians having their ‘snouts in the trough’. In Australia such entitlements are now managed by the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority to reduce this odium. In Canada, MPs have been reluctant to use their travel points to bring partners and children to Ottawa for the same reason. As has been said in relation to New Zealand: ‘The idea of family-friendly parliaments competes with the idea that parliament is an already entitled workplace for an elite class who need to be careful in instituting “additional benefits” for themselves’.³⁹

Sitting Hours and the Sitting Calendar

Another example of the struggle to make parliaments family friendly concerns sitting hours and the sitting calendar. This is again one of the many issues to which the IPU has sought to direct attention, in its Plan of Action for Gender-Sensitive Parliaments, recommending that parliaments:

Rearrange their sitting hours (e.g. by establishing compressed sitting weeks, creating schedules that start early, avoiding late voting, and aligning sitting times with the school calendar) so that parliamentarians can return to their electorates and spend more time with their families.⁴⁰

While there are some complex practical issues to be resolved, resistance has also come in the name of traditional parliamentary practices. One of the many arguments against women’s entry to parliament was that they ‘would not have the strength or stamina to cope with all-night sittings of the House’.⁴¹ In the UK, attempts to institute morning sittings and limit night ones began in the 1960s but were resisted for decades—particularly by lawyers who wanted to be able to appear in court in the morning. In the Australian Parliament, late-night sittings were also common. In the 1970s, MPs and Senators were provided with pillows and blankets so ‘they could snooze in their offices during all-night sittings’.⁴² It is not clear what provision was made for Hansard reporters and other staff required to be in attendance while parliament was sitting.

Such sitting hours came increasingly under challenge as younger women entered parliament. For example, after the Victorian Parliament had been sitting until midnight, Lynne Kosky, an Opposition frontbencher with children, appealed for family-friendly sitting hours to be introduced. In response, the Victorian Premier made a traditional defence of existing parliamentary arrangements:

It’s a bit rich to ask that the whole parliamentary procedure …be changed to accommodate your requirements, which were obviously there when you voluntarily offered to serve. You’ve got to make a deliberate decision as to whether you want to spend time, while your children are young, with them or whether you want to try and mix the two careers.⁴³

In 2022, after the findings and recommendations of the Review of Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces and the election of a new Labor Government, progress was made in the Australian Parliament on the issue of more family-friendly sitting hours. On the first sitting day of the new parliament the standing orders of the House of Representatives were changed to include earlier starts on some sitting days and no votes after 6.30 pm to enable those with family responsibilities to go home. Similar changes were made to the Senate standing orders. Family-friendly sitting hours were seen as having the additional advantage of limiting the heavy consumption of alcohol associated with late-night sittings—a known risk factor for sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Such changes benefit not only parliamentarians but also staffers with caring responsibilities, but they can be short-lived. For example, family-friendly sitting hours had been introduced previously in the Australian Parliament but in large part did not survive a change of government in 1996. Similarly in Western Australia, the first woman Premier, Carmen Lawrence, introduced family-friendly sitting hours in 1992 but they were dropped when she lost government.

In a country such as Australia, where parliamentarians are expected to live in their electorate, there have always been counterarguments from those representing rural and remote areas who would prefer longer sitting hours and a shorter sitting week, enabling them to fly home sooner. This has also been true of countries such as Argentina, where ‘deputies from the provinces most distant from the City prefer to compact the work into three days, even though the pace of the sessions is “inhuman”’.⁴⁴ As mentioned above and as reinforced by the experience of Covid lockdowns, many now advocate the greater use of digital technology for remote parliamentary participation, as one approach to accommodating caring responsibilities.

The clash of parliamentary sitting days with school holidays is another issue where some progress has been made. Reports by both the IPU and the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe have found that aligning the parliamentary calendar to avoid clashes with school holidays is the most widely adopted of three family-friendly practices, the others relating to sitting hours and fixed times for votes.⁴⁵ Progress has occurred despite difficulties for national parliaments where subnational jurisdictions have school holidays at different times (for example clashes with Scottish school holidays in the UK). The Australian Parliament has noted clashes with school holidays in the annual sitting calendar since 2000. In the period to 2011 there was an average clash of 18 sitting days with school holidays in the House of Representatives and 15 days in the Senate. Since 2012, however, when the IPU Plan of Action was agreed, there was an average clash of only five days in the House and six days in the Senate.⁴⁶

Parliamentarians’ Offices as Female, but Perilous, Spaces

While parliament itself has traditionally been a masculine domain, the group of staff supporting ministers and parliamentarians has long been mainly female. Australian studies of ministers’ offices in the 1970s and early 1980s showed that women comprised between 59 and 66 per cent of all staff. They were mainly in administrative roles such as receptionists, diary managers, typists and office managers.⁴⁷ In 1973 Peter Wilenski, adviser to the then Prime Minister, said, ‘The House consists of a huge male superstructure supported by an army of women. … A lot of these women are very intelligent. Rather than becoming senior office holders they remain secretaries. The system exploits these highly skilled people at a cheap price’.⁴⁸

Today women continue to outnumber men in ministerial and parliamentary offices and in constituency offices. In Australia in 2021, 60 per cent of staff working in the local offices of parliamentarians were women and 57 per cent of ministerial staff were female. However, men continued to dominate the senior ranks in ministers’ offices, holding 68 per cent of senior positions.⁴⁹ In recent years women have moved into the highest job in ministers’ offices (in Australia, known as the chief of staff) with 35 per cent of Australian ministers’ offices headed by women. Four of Australia’s recent prime ministers employed a woman as their closest and most trusted adviser.⁵⁰

The backstage nature of the staffer job gives women a certain freedom of action not enjoyed by female politicians. The hidden nature of their influence means that female advisers are less likely to provoke public outrage for acts of dominance or combative behaviour that transgress expectations of women’s gender roles. Their supporting and ancillary role means that women can occupy these positions without disrupting traditional power relations. However, their power is formally limited and ‘practically perilous’ as they can be subject to harsh gender-based criticism if perceived to transgress ancillary roles.

In 1968 Australian Prime Minister John Gorton scandalised his critics when he appointed 22-year-old Ainsley Gotto as his principal private secretary. She attracted intense media attention and was one of the most talked about people in Australia at the time. When appointed, she was described as ‘pert, freckled and bubbling with self-confidence’ and photographed cradling a kitten. Yet she was also criticised as ‘cold blooded’ and ruling with ‘a ruthless authority’. After Gorton resigned, one headline read: ‘PM listened to girl more than to his cabinet’.⁵¹ Gotto was not only young but had stepped outside the ancillary role played by most women in parliamentary offices. In 1969 a journalist wrote: ‘If Ainsley Gotto were 43 rather than 23 years old she might be just another old battleaxe among that rather formidable brigade of maiden ladies mother-henning their bosses with teapot, typewriter and a telephone switch in the Ministerial suites in Parliament House, Canberra’.⁵² Almost 50 years later, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (2013–2015) praised his chief of staff Peta Credlin as ‘the smartest and the fiercest political warrior I have ever worked with’. Yet she faced savage criticism for her ‘political warrior’ approach, which appeared to emasculate her principal.⁵³ Both women faced persistent rumours that they were having affairs with the prime ministers they worked for.

The extreme power differential between parliamentarians and their staff, the precarious nature of their tenure and the secrecy demanded by party loyalty, creates the conditions for sexual misconduct, bullying and discrimination. These features of the parliamentary workplace have long existed for parliamentarians’ staff.

Unfinished Agenda

In Australia, despite the commitment of the new Labor Prime Minister to a ‘family-friendly parliament’ the family-friendly sitting calendar had to be revised almost immediately in 2022. On the death of Queen Elizabeth II, parliament was suspended for a week, leading to a clash with nationwide school holidays. And despite the Prime Minister’s commitment to a kinder, gentler parliament, partisan mudslinging, including the weaponisation of material given to police during a sexual assault trial, soon resumed.

In this chapter we looked at the way social expectations concerning women’s family responsibilities and gender roles long constrained their entry to parliament. The few women elected to public office tended to be those who had completed their reproductive roles, meaning that parliaments could continue the norms and practices dating from when they were all-male institutions. Traditional roles and expectations also shaped the work women performed as parliamentary staffers.

The adoption of party quotas in Australia, as in other parts of the world, resulted in the increased presence of women in parliament, and most notably younger women, from the 1990s. This led to scenes that attracted international attention, such as the sight of a breastfeeding Senator. However, while there was gradual institutional acknowledgement that elected representatives and the growing number of women staffers might have caring responsibilities, there were still many issues to be addressed. In the next chapter we look at Westminster conventions and institutional norms that made it difficult to acknowledge the issue of sexual harassment, despite its prevalence.