The campaign to get more women involved in politics has been renewed of late, with MSPs from the Labour, SNP, Lib Dem and Green parties demanding some kind of quota system, to redress the gender imbalance in the Holyrood parliament.
Why now? It seems a strange time for Scotland’s female politicians to get exercised about the issue. Last week, nominations for the SNP leadership closed, leaving Nicola Sturgeon unchallenged. The upshot is that in under a month, when Alex Salmond steps down, Scotland will have its first female First Minister.
Scottish Labour is headed by Johann Lamont, the Conservatives’ Scottish leader is Ruth Davidson and even the Presiding Officer is a woman Tricia Marwick. This, by most parliaments’ standards, is pretty impressive on the equality front.
In stark contrast, David Cameron has struggled to find enough women to put in his Cabinet, Labour has never had a female leader nationally and the Lib Dems’ one truly powerful woman (Miriam Clegg) is not a politician.
But look at Scotland; its legislature is awash with women. By this time next month, Willie Rennie, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, will be a lonely man in a chamber dominated by its distaff side.
Scotland has long bucked the UK trend, with its Nordic-like levels of representation. In the first devolved parliament of 199, nearly 40% of members were women. This has now gone down to 35%, but that still puts Scotland in the forefront of female-friendly parliaments, ranking 22nd in the world, compared to the Commons, which is 57th and has just 20% of female MPs.
Labour and the SNP used quotas, formally and informally, in the first Scottish elections and today’s younger politicians, such as Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, are trying to engineer a 50-50 ratio; they believe more women would lead to better policies and build a better Scotland.
The idea that women’s feminising influence would make the parliament more benign, less confrontational and more consensual was one of the ideals of devolution. It was to be the dawn of the new politics.
Things didn’t quite turn out that way, as anyone who has witnessed First Minister’s Questions would testify. We have seen the likes of Wendy Alexander and Annabel Goldie leading their parties but Scottish politics did not become less adversarial.
And we don’t have to wait until Ms Sturgeon is in post to discover what a female-led parliament will really look or sound like.
One of the highlights (if you like that sort of thing) of the referendum was the scrap between Ms Sturgeon and Ms Lamont during a finger-jabbing STV debate. “Catfight” and “fishwives” among the kinder descriptions did not come close.
With a general election looming, it will be brutal business as usual. Ms Lamont’s leadership was seriously undermined in the referendum by the loss of the Labour heartlands to the SNP. Although Gordon Brown and Jim Murphy have resisted calls from (male) Labour MPs to replace her, she remains under a cloud as she tries to seize back the Labour vote from the nationalists.
Ms Sturgeon not only has to prove she is a match for her pugilistic predecessor; she also has to appease the influx of agitators in her party who want a re-run of September 18. Watching her every move from the back benches will be Mr Salmond, a permanently disgruntled figure for disaffected separatists to cling to if she fails to deliver on devo max.
Ms Davidson, meanwhile, having raised her profile by the end of the referendum, will be desperate to capitalise on No voters’ support. She wants to expand her party’s appeal to the centre right, as both Labour and the SNP lurch leftwards.
For all the women leaders, this is not the moment for compromise or cooperation; there will be no room for niceties when the sisterhood takes over.
In fact, it is the men who may come to feel marginalised by the regular spectacle of female ferociousness. It is they who may well be discouraged, by the nastiness, from furthering their political careers, or entering the game in the first place.
Perhaps the gender balance might correct itself without the need for quotas, once the claws come out.