The paucity of women in Malta’s Parliaments is striking. The 1951 legislature, in which women occupied ten percent of the legislature’s seats, was a highpoint in their representation. That percentage has never since been exceeded or even been equaled.
But is the scarcity of women parliamentarians explained by their inability to attract voter support as successfully as male candidates? The answer to this question is no. The Table below suggests a different answer.
That last two highlighted columns show that there is a very small gap between the percentage of women who became candidates and the percentage of women who won a seat. Their success rate differs very little from that of the male candidates.
Thus, considering the success in converting candidacies into seats, there is no significant difference between male and female candidates. It would seem that it is the dearth of women nominees which explains the dearth of women legislators. Once nominated, they have tended, as a group, to compete as well as the men.
The graph below illustrates the issue in a different way. It maps the success rates of male and female candidacies, showing the percentage of each of the two groups that managed to win a seat. The tendency in recent years has been for both groups to convert less than thirty percent of their respective candidacies into parliamentary seats.
