Is it important to have women in our parliament?

Government has always been a man’s world and it looks like things won’t be changing anytime soon with a mass exodus of women leaving parliament.

With the federal election just around the corner, Australia dissolved its 44th parliament on Monday to make way for a new wave of MPs.

The only problem is that most of these MPs will be men.

It is expected that Liberal Jason Falinski will replace Bronwyn Bishop in her seat, while Liberal Trevor Evans or Labor’s Pat O’Neil will take over from Queensland MP Teresa Gambaro.

It’s the same situation for a number of other female MPs who are will all be replaced by men.

While Labor has made a push in recent years to include more female MPs, the numbers are still no where near as high as the amount of men in the party.

The LNP trails both Labor and the Greens with only 32 female MPs in the coalition.

Labor will stand at least 47 lower house female candidates, while the Coalition will stand at least 32. This is compared with 43 from the Greens. There are 150 seats in the lower house.

This means there will be even less women in the 45th parliament than we had in the last.

Outgoing Liberal MP Sharman Stone said she is disappointed by this.

“If you are going on the number of women like myself who are retiring and have been replaced by preselected male candidates, and all those guys got up, the expectation is we would probably go down to lower than we are now,” she told SMH.

“Men and women do come from different perspectives and life experiences, and its been well researched that boards and management groups have better outcomes for their shareholders when there’s more balanced numbers of men and women in leadership.”

Despite the push to get more women into politics, some have suggested there just aren’t enough women who actually want to take on the role.

While some women say they would like to be better represented in parliament with more women in power, others say it doesn’t make a difference and that it is more about who can do the job right, not what sex you are.

What do you think?

Do we need more women in parliament? Or does it not matter?