Advocacy 
“What are you doing, and how can I help you?”
That’s what Shari Graydon asked the executive director of Equal Voice back in 2019. She had just learned from our ground-breaking Gender Gap Tracker research that politicians made up a whopping 60% of the men and women most frequently quoted by Canada’s most influential news media.
The discovery made her realize that Informed Perspectives (formerly Informed Opinions) couldn’t achieve our mandate – to bridge the gender gap in media – until Equal Voice realized its goal of ensuring women held as many seats as men.
For over more than two decades, organizations like Equal Voice have done vital work encouraging more women to run, hosting campaign schools and raising awareness.
These efforts may have moved individuals, but they failed to move the system itself: men still occupy 69.5% of the seats, and Canada’s global ranking for the representation of women in politics has dropped from a respectable 26th to a shameful 70th.
This is a problem, because like the media, politics have the power to influence everything else.
And it’s why we’ve been investing heavily in research, public engagement and advocacy aimed at making systemic change.
Instead of preparing women to fit an electoral machine that was built to keep them out, we’re exploring proven remedies that will ensure they hold the balance of power within.
Over the past four years, we have:
1) Reviewed the different paths to parity other countries have taken and created an accessible summary to make clear what the broad options include;
2) Collaborated with scholars and advocates to write, publish and disseminate thought leadership on related issues in dozens of publications across Canada;
3) Commissioned polling research documenting Canadians’ overwhelming support for seeing women hold a balance of power and publicized it through hundreds of news stories;
4) Met with dozens of MPs and policy makers about our research, the actions Canada could take, and the democratic and economic benefits we could realize;
5) Created an online tool that makes it easy for residents to send an email to their elected representatives at all three levels of government, requesting action.
Our efforts are gaining traction.
Earlier this fall in Ottawa, we met with senior officials to talk about how to advance the issue. I’m delighted to report that we’re seeing an openness to this conversation that didn’t exist a few years ago.
We need to seize the moment – but we can’t do it alone!
We’re collaborating with international experts to create a tailored brief that maps out the most impactful means of achieving progress within Canada’s first-past-the-post single-member system. And we’re reminding politicians why acting now is not just in our best interests, but in theirs, too.
Your support for this work has been – and will continue to be – invaluable. And when we ultimately realize our collective ambition to “Balance the Power” we look forward to declaring in celebration:
“Look what we made happen together!
