Madam, – While I was working in Kuwait a number of years ago, the university there operated a gender quota in its school of medicine, whereby there was a cap on the number of women who could enter the school. As a result of this quota system, women had to get significantly higher second-level education grade scores than their male counterparts in order to gain entry to the school.
The corollary of this is that gender quotas in our electoral system would undoubtedly produce situations where a female candidate would be selected, even when a male candidate might have received more votes. This is not only a complete reversal of the basis of our electoral system, but would, in my view, inevitably give rise to a series of court challenges. It would be far better to address the causes of gender imbalance than introduce quotas. – Yours, etc,