The Standing Committee on the Status of Women was created in the House of Commons to promote the status of women in Canadian society. Now that the Standing Committee has been active for over ten years, I explore the politics of assessing the committee’s success in promoting gender equality in the House of Commons. To do so, I wrestle with a number of typical indicators of gender equality within legislative bodies including the percentage of women present in the House who promote a women-friendly policy agenda, the articulation of gender in debates and committee deliberations through gender mainstreaming, the topics investigated by the committee, how non-governmental organizations such as women’s groups access legislative and committee processes, and whether there is a government response.
This paper will argue that equality-focused legislative committees, such as the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women, have the potential to substantively attend to the policy requirements of women while also building democratic government-society relations. I present a cautionary position, however, given the challenges of discerning and measuring success along with the politics of gender mainstreaming in highly partisan settings.
