Prime Minister Gives Impassioned Gender Quotas Speech : ‘Malta Is Indebted To Its Women’
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has delivered a powerful speech in favour of the newly-proposed gender quotas reform, warning that Malta still lags behind when it comes to full equality between men and women.
“This country is yet to achieve full equality between men and women, and women are currently considered lesser beings than men,” Muscat said at a PL activity in Birgu to mark Freedom Day. “I know these words may sound shocking, but I say them with responsibility as a man, as a son and as a father. We don’t all have the same job opportunities or equal pay for equal work, and it had to be this movement to give a clear, unequivocal signal that women belong within the country’s highest institutions.”
“I feel a sense of pride at how it was a Labour Prime Minister who appointed Malta’s first woman minister, its first woman Speaker and its first woman President. That is our legacy, but our new legacy must be to normalise it and ensure adequate representation of men and women in the highest institutions of the land.”
“We recognise that we are indebted to our women, that only 27 women but hundreds of men have ever been elected to Parliament in Malta’s history. I am convinced that a few years after we have implemented this change, we’ll weep at how we hadn’t implemented it earlier.”
“Nobody had wanted to implement the minimum wage, to give the vote to women or to youths or to introduce pensions, things we all now take for granted as the foundations of a free and modern Malta. We will keep climbing the steps and ,although we will encounter problems, we know we are in the right direction.”
According to the proposed reform, political parties will be financially incentivised to recruit, train and promote female candidates but won’t be obliged to present gender-balanced candidacy lists. If the under-represented sex obtain fewer than 40% of the seats, a ‘gender corrective mechanism’ will automatically kick in. This will be capped at a maximum of 12 seats, which will be equally divided between the PL and the PN.
It will require the consent of the Nationalist Party to pass into law.
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