General elections in Ireland have gender quotes aimed at encouraging more women to get involved in politics through positive discrimination. 

Positive discrimination is a form of discrimination that favors someone by treating them differently in a positive way.

However, some people have dismissed gender quotas as "punishments to other sectors of society".

In 2016, Brian Mohan, former Chair of the Fianna Fáil Dublin Central branch, lost a legal challenge of gender quotas in politics that half the state funding of parties who fail to ensure at least 30% of their general election candidates are women.

He told Newstalk Breakfast that he doesn't believe positive discrimination is the way to achieve equality.

"You're still discriminating against some part of some sector to promote another sector", he said.

"Grenade into politics"

Director of UCD's Gender Studies programme Mary McAuliffe supports positive discrimination "in certain situations".

"We still have a long way to go to catch up with full equity in the workforce, in terms of pay, in terms of the gender pay gap and in getting more women into the workforce", she aid.

"I think the COVID pandemic showed that once we were all told to go home and home was the safe space that the care duties on women, women in the house and women in the workforce, are still very much prevalent."

Mr Mohan said the quotas were a "grenade into politics" as he believes there had been little intervention otherwise before they were introduced.

More women involved

However, Ms McAuliffe asserted that the gender quote system was "a very well thought-out idea".

"We can see the increase in the number of women in the Dáil and hopefully it will now be expanded to local elections because frankly, the number of women on local councils is terrible", she said.

"The thing is, when you live in a patriarchy ... working class women, women of color, all women have less opportunity to get into politics, to get into boardrooms, to get into the workplace."

"If we're going to do it for women we should do it for everything."

Mr Mohan called gender quotas the "easy option" and that women aren't the only people who are discriminated against in this country.

"People of color or people of certain backgrounds and ethnicities or, or discriminate in this country again, we haven't really done anything, you know, to decline to help them", he said.

"If we're going to do it for women we should do it for everything."

Main image by Tetyana Kulchytska/Alamy