In the future, the municipal council will measure how often and how long women talk. Only the SP and Greens found it really good.
The speaking time of women in the council is now recorded.
There are emotive words that are programmed to trigger heated votes in the city of Zurich’s parliament – even if an expression may have been completely foreign to one or the other member until now. In any case, on Wednesday evening there was a debate in the Council about the introduction of a so-called “gender watch protocol”: SP and Greens demanded in a postulate that it should be checked how the gender ratio should be shown when speaking and speaking. The parties suspect that women are underrepresented.
The heated votes then followed. In the end, the motion was accepted, but narrowly with 60 to 51 votes. On the one hand, this may have been due to the fact that red-green does not have a comfortable majority in the new legislature, but only a wafer-thin one. On the other hand, the AL had decided to allow voting.
SP: “It’s not enough to count chairs”
In terms of the distribution of seats, women are indeed in the minority on the Council: the proportion of women is 39 percent in the new legislature, compared to 31 percent before. However, Selina Walgis (Greens) and Marion Schmid (SP), who submitted the postulate, believe that women are even more underrepresented in terms of speaking time. “It’s not enough for us to just count how many chairs are occupied by women on the Council,” said Schmid.
However, she emphasized that it is not about demanding a speaking quota by gender or muzzled men. “We want to create awareness.” According to Schmid, it is likely that other groups in the population, such as young people or people with a migration background, do not get enough of a say in parliament.
The Council cannot actually be accused of a lack of gender affinity, on the contrary. In 2019, the council office did not want to accept a proposal from Susanne Brunner (SVP) because it was not formulated “gender-fair”; Brunner appealed and was right before the district council.
Brunner – the only woman in the SVP parliamentary group – said on Wednesday about the Gender Watch protocol: “Whoever has something to say should talk instead of reporting so that the statistics are correct in the end.” Keeping the minutes would also mean a lot of work for the parliamentary services. “They really have better things to do.”
FDP: “Anti-equality bureaucracy advance”
Martina Zürcher (FDP) described the application as an “anti-equality bureaucratic advance” and said, addressed to the women in the hall: “Speak up if you have something to say. Or switch to a commission with many property deals. And: Acknowledge that long votes are often worse than short votes.” Her own request to speak lasted just a minute.
The AL showed understanding for the concern, but doubted the usefulness of a protocol; David Garcia Nuñez warned of an “uninterpretable data graveyard”. According to the AL, who reports how often should not only be examined for possible under-representation of women. On Wednesday, she submitted a request to make data on voting results by business and member as well as requests to speak, including speaking time, public. This will be debated in Council at a later date.