The Department of Gender Studies will be hosting a Public Lecture entitled 'Gender quotas - a catalyst for change in Irish politics?'
Speaker: Dr Fiona Buckley
Venue: NALR - New Anatomy Lecture Room – University of Malta Msida Campus
Date: Thursday 11 January
Time: 17:15 till 19:15
In 2012 legislative gender quotas were introduced by the Irish government. The legislation specifies that payments to political parties ‘shall be reduced by 50 per cent, unless at least 30 per cent of the candidates whose candidatures were authenticated by the qualified party at the preceding general election were women and at least 30 per cent were men’. The 30 per cent gender threshold came into effect at the 2016 general election. Research demonstrates that gender quotas work to increase women’s political descriptive representation, but to do so, political parties must engage with them in ‘goodwill’, be ‘well intentioned’ or place women in ‘winnable seats’. This lecture examines if this was the case at the 2016 general election.
The general public is cordially invited to attend this public lecture.
RSVP Ms Marica Galea on +356 2340 3956 or send an email to
marica.galea@um.edu.mt
Dr Fiona Buckley is a lecturer in the Department of Government and Politics, University
College Cork, Ireland specialising in gender politics. Fiona is a graduate of Queen's University
Belfast being conferred with a Phd in Political Science in 2016. Fiona's research is largely
focused on gender and cabinet government, women’s political candidacy, and gender
quotas, but she has also published on Irish politics, electoral administration and voting
behaviour. Fiona's work has been published in a number of leading political science journals,
and she is the editor of three books Politics and Gender in Ireland: The Quest for Political
Agency (with Yvonne Galligan, published be Routledge in 2015); Electoral Management; Institutions and Practices in an Established Democracy (with Theresa Reidy, published be Routledge in 2017); and The Road to 5050: Gender Quotas for Ireland (with Edel Clancy, Colette Finn and Margaret O'Keeffe, published in 2012). In 2018, Fiona will be a Visiting Research Fellow on the Electoral Integrity Project in the University of Sydney.