Women are getting a raw deal this election.
Extraction of electoral data shows that on the Labor side women get pushed to the marginals while men get the safe seats. This is true of both challenging and sitting candidates.
This is despite Labor’s professed aim of equality in representation.
Labor is contesting all 148 seats.
Nine very safe Labor seats became available when the retiring member did not stand or through redistribution. All have margins of more than 8 per cent and are dead certainties for the Labor candidate to become an MP. Men got all of them.
Of the 28 seats already held by Labor with a margin of 8 per cent or more, men hold 27 and a woman holds just one.
Down on the marginal end of things, it is different.
There are 20 seats with a margin of 3 per cent or less where there is no sitting Labor member. Women get to have a crack at 10 of these; and men get a crack at the other 10.
In other words there is equality down at the hard-yakka end of the contest, but at the easy end, men dominate.
The Coalition is no better. At least it has the advantage of being consistently sexist and without the taint of hypocrisy associated with Labor’s noises not being met by action.
The Coalition has 29 sitting members in dead-safe seats (8 per cent or more). Of those 26 are men and three are women. That is better than Labor’s tally at that end.
At the other end, there are 31 seats with a margin of less than 3 per cent where the Coalition does not have a sitting member. Women will get a crack at eight of these. Men will contest 23. That is a worse ratio than Labor.
Of the four dead-safe Coalition seats (greater than 8 per cent) where the sitting candidate is not standing, all four went to males. Three of the vacancies, however, were not natural retirements where a woman might get a chance, but retirements forced through macho pre-selection struggles in which women sensibly did not take part.
In short, there is a lot of talk and very little action on female representation.